Alicia heard what had been ordered and then looked around her for anything to do. “So...what are we supposed to do until then?” she asked, looking slightly confused at their orders. Didn’t they need to go all together somewhere?
As the others made their way off towards the castle, and the elf started barking orders at his countrymen, Alan clicked his neck, rolled his shoulders, and started to look about the place. The trees were dense and dark, a promise of hostility encircling the beginnings of their camp, and Alan nodded to himself at Balidvar’s command to avoid them. If you can’t see the far side of the room, you don’t go wandering there without a torch.
Alan’s ears perked as a curious looking woman with an alchemist’s satchel voiced her confusion.
“We’re meant to get on with our own jobs, whatever they are, Miss…” He quirked an eyebrow as he trailed off, inviting her to give him her name.
“Alicia Fairbright. Nice to meet you...and I do recall we were supposed to be working as team on this expedition. I can’t do anything here or find anything rare by waiting outside while everyone goes off to play hero,” she stated.
“So then? What is your story? Also...what do you think we should do?”
Alan’s other eyebrow raised to meet the one already cocked. He had not been working as Karl for a while now and he hoped, in a way, that he would not need to. He preferred being naturally expressive - as inexpressive as he really was.
He withdrew his hand from his belt, and cracked his knuckles.
“Name is Alan. Nice to meet you, too - but I don’t quite know what you mean by my story.” He added on, not quite as an afterthought. “As for what we should do? Dunno about yourself, Alicia, but I think I’m gonna get some of these boys organised into a watch, set a rota or something. You seem to have an understanding of chemistry an’ what not, so perhaps you can scan the area away from the trees for anything harmful or poisonous.”
Alan leaned down to heft his pack onto his back. Didn’t want it getting lost. Or stolen.
“Losing horses, or worse, losing men, ain’t something we can easily afford. If you do find something you reckon will fuck us up, do us a favour and destroy it if you can.”
“Hmm. Well...our boss did tell us to wait here and not go wandering off and getting caught or spotted. So I could perhaps stay around and help set up watch? Perhaps as we are keeping our eyes open for any monsters or bandits I may spot something valuable around here?” offered Alicia - her entire speech being rapid and rather without a filter. “Anyways. Let us get some sticks and torches ready…” she cheered. “Wait...how long did he say he’d be gone?”
Alan stopped for a moment, turning back from the group of idle men he’d been about to shout at with a look of almost-confusion edging its way onto his face.
“I don’t think he gave us an exact deadline, Alicia. He’s sweeping an until-now abandoned enemy fortification for threats. That could take hours, or it could be a task that stretches over a couple of days if it proves particularly difficult. Similarly, I suppose they might be out in minutes, if there’s somethin’ truly awful in there.” Alan nodded as he finished, as if tapering off the sentence in his mind, before turning back again to those idle fools who were pulling pipes out to smoke.
“No smoking! If the fuckin’ elves can smell that shite for a hundred feet, you bet that wolves and monsters an’ all sorts of horrid things can too.” He growled. “Air in these places don’t move. Smells longer for hours and hours. Go without at least until we’re in the castle. And make yourselves busy.”
“So...no torches then?” asked Alicia, groaning in response - seeing as she was pretty sure the mosquitos would soon be upon them.
Though compared to getting eaten by monsters, or attacked by bandits. She expected for things to be...less than stellar against smoking.
“...darn...so then. How shall begin watching things? Up high? Or down low?”
“We’ll take it in shifts, an’ give the guards alternative patrol routes. I don’t want anyone not watching someone else’s back, and I don’t want anyone without their own back bein’ watched in turn. Guards can swap posts every hour, so they don’ get bored an’ nod off.” Alan started to organise the idle soldiers into twos and threes, assigning them to the various corners of the provisional camp and giving them their instructions.
“We’ll join the watch ourselves, o’ course. As for torches, we might see if we can set up some lanterns or somethin’ once darkness encroaches fully - but they make us obvious, and they ruin your night vision. I want our boys keeping their eyes good.”
Alan’s ears perked again.
“What do you mean up high or down low?”
“I mean should we set up posts on the highest reaches we can. I’know...seeing higher to down. Or just keep plenty of people watching the roads and paths...either one could work or fail…” she explained to him. “Anyways. Are we setting up camp here already? I thought were supposed to wait until those others came back. Or are we staying in this vicinity for longer?”
Alan gestured to the area inside the short wall around the castle itself, previously isolated by a gate, now open to the exterior of the castle grounds and the darkness of the woods around that.
“Inside the walls, I reckon we can set a few things up for the time bein’. How much we set up precisely is gonna depend on how long the Lord takes inside, but we can at least get a place to feed and tie horses goin’. Maybe…” Alan stepped just inside the gate arch, and looked up at the wall from the other side.
Some time ago, years or more, men had been able to gain a height advantage from the parapet there - the broken, unstable parapet.
Thinking of what Alicia had just said, Alan thought he could see a few places along the wall where men might gain that advantage once more.
“Up high. Not a poor idea at all, I don’t think. Lady Alicia, would you help me find some useful timbers in these ruins, so we can set a place for our bowmen to keep watch Up High, while the other men keep their watch Down Low?”
“Sure...perhaps we can find some useful herbs in the area too…” she said, smiling at him.
P R O F I L E The former EOD Staff Sergeant Samuel Sharpe is a pale shadow of his former self, half consumed by paranoia and fear, the remaining half kept from decay and destruction by nothing more than the breadth of a hair and the abuse of copious chemical stimulants; now known primarily as Sharp for the quickness of his mind and the nature of afflicted existence, stripped down to a ragged edge from the person he used to be. Even his bed is practically wrapped in tripwires - a holdover from the days where a smartly placed claymore was all that came between his life and a knife at night. In spite of all this, however, Samuel is still a genuinely bright and intelligent man, educated too. He thinks quickly and sees more than he lets on, drawing conclusions and working with them like a flash of lightning, sifting lies from truth and connecting the dots of the plot behind the plot. Apart from that, there is only the rare turn of compassion or generosity to show you that Samuel Sharpe still exists as anything other than a legal name. Sharp alone is who he is now.
The ex-trooper sports a tall and wiry athletic build, standing at about 6"0, bound with deceptively dense muscle and sinew. His hair is dense, thick, and untidy, dotted with streaks of grey and white. His eyes seem to dart constantly between any company he keeps, the door of the room they're in, and his own gun. The left side of his face and head is peppered with streaks and dots of scar tissue from a fragmentation grenade explosion at medium range some years ago. His left arm bears a Vlhakian Armed Forces division tattoo, complete with regiment name, rank and serial number, and medical identifier - to be specific, the original insignia is a kite shield of green and white, bearing a black sword crossed with a black hammer in front of it, all upon a field of cross-hatching. It used to glow thanks to implanted NanoLEDs, but no longer, as the entire design has been crossed out with a pair of scars inflicted with a kitchen knife. The term 'EOD' is still identifiable, however. His right arm is also tattooed with a full sleeve of cultural design, utterly covered with the intricate interlocking branches of an oak tree in an old Antrean ethnic design. In minute text between some of the branches text in a dead, celtic-esque language can be seen. Even Sharp doesn't know what it says. The area around his ID tag has been mutilated during several tampering attempts, and is now a mangled mess of purplish scar tissue that he is barely able to hide with makeup during his brief trips into the city.
D A Y S - G O N E To sum it up, nice and concise like, Sammy was born in the heart of Vlhakia, a pure, hot blooded Vlhakian boy. His early life was comfortable, if not wealthy or extravagant, and while he did not quite want for nothing it was certainly true that his needs were met - at least until the beginning of the Antrean war of secession from the empire, and the subsequent crash of the economy. When he was 20, his older brother joined the army, and when he was 21 he followed. They were put in separate regiments, but often occupied the same bases - his brother was going through the officer selection process for a mechanised battle group, and he had delved instead into combat engineering, which meant their specialisms complemented each other. They were reasonably well paid, and their food and lodging was taken care of by the general service corps, which put them at an advantage over their gradually more and more poverty-stricken countrymen - so ultimately, life was actually pretty good.
Life stayed pretty good for a while, as they gradually got educated in the art of warfare, and their nationalistic indoctrination reached its final stages.
Then they went to war. It was their job to suppress the growing Antrean rebellion before they were forced to acknowledge their independence, and in this endeavour they were doomed to fail. Antrea is a resource rich region, and the locals knew the landscape better than them. There were ambushes left and right, sneak attacks in the dead of night by Antrean commando units, throats being cut and bombs being set along the roads for their convoys. Sharp came a few centimetres from death more than a few times during the doomed campaign, and every time he did it stripped a little more of the man he'd used to be away from him. It got worse and worse, his mind becoming more and more twisted and convoluted by the stress of war, until eventually his brothers in arms began firing on civilians too.
To be perfectly fair, the Antreans were committing perfidy by using plainclothes commandos. That was a war crime.
But they weren't just killing suspects, they were killing everyone. Eventually Sharp would find out - long after the war was over - that his and his brother's detachment had been literally the most criminal element of the Vlhakian military during that conflict. Mass graves. Lynchings. Firing squads. Eventually it didn't matter who they were killing, they just needed a way to hurt Antrea, to get revenge on them for the hell they were going through.
Sharp found himself staring at an entire family, hanged from lamp posts in a shitty little backwater town, at two in the morning.
He couldn't do it any more.
He went around the battalion's vehicles and he rigged their fuel lines to dump uncontrollably into the engine when the engines were revved, and then he unhooked the safeties on the weapons caches. The moment they were turned on, the moment they tried to run another civilian down, the trucks, the APCs, the tanks - they would set their own fuel tanks alight, burn, and then light off their own magazines and explode.
Nobody asked him a single question while he did it. Nobody bothered. He was Vlhakian, he was a ranking NCO, he was the little brother of the most popular Captain in the company.
The one mistake he made was in trying to warn his brother, to get him out of there before it happened.
When he did, his brother initially didn't believe him - but then when he did, he flew into a rage and tried to kill him, driven mad by the grief of war, by the sheer bereavement of learning that his own brother was a traitor. If Sharp hadn't fought back, he'd have been hanged the very next day, with the next group of innocents. Instead, he did, and slew his own brother.
The struggle was loud enough that an alarm was raised, and as his brother lay clutching at the knife wound in his chest, staring incredulously at Sharp and mouthing the words 'fucking traitor' over and over and over and over and over again, the first explosions went off.
The detachment was later registered as destroyed. Many of the men were listed as KIA - and Sharp was listed as MIA.
On his way out of their camp, he got caught by a piece of shrapnel, and was set to bleed to death before he made it anywhere - but instead, he found himself in the arms of an Antrean guerilla who had already been planning to attack the camp. Rather than killing him outright, the guerilla took him in and nursed him back to health - initially so that he could be interrogated properly, but when he found out what Sharp had done, so that he could genuinely recover. The compassion the guerilla showed him, the traditions he was taught, the justice he saw in the Antrean system...
Years later, as an unofficial resident of Antrea, and an employee of the 43rd Precinct, he would disfigure his regimental tattoo and get it redone in Old Antrean in the man's honour.
Yeah, I didn’t necessarily want to make a thing of it, but I’m actually semi-homeless and living out of a hotel at the moment unfortunately. I should be moving somewhere permanently this Wednesday coming, but that’s a big part of the reasons why I’ve been a bit inconsistent lately. Sorry folks.
“No, my dear, I mean Blue magic. It is one of the many forms that magic can take, and something you may have the opportunity to learn in time. Blue magic in particular,” he continued as he came to the very top of the house and stepped off the stairs onto the highest landing in the building, “governs transport, movement, and space. Hence we shall use a powerful and ritual form of it in order to take you far afield. It will not look like a portal, but if you’ve ever had the pleasure of consuming fiction wherein portals are used, you’ll know what I mean.”
Ana nodded enthusiastically as he spoke.
“It’s made our job not just easier, but possible in the first place.”
Here the corridor was littered with broken bits of wood and metal, frames and linings and bounds, like another hundred picture frames shattered into fragments. Up ahead and above them, the shallow tinkling of the windchime people’s legacies grew louder as a breeze passed thin judgement over the ruined country home, running through the broken windows and holes in the walls like water over gravel.
The noise stroked the inside of Siobhan’s skull, ever so gently, like the loving legs of a friendly spider, or like silk thread through a needle.
Eventually, they came to a steel footladder leading up into the attic - the ladder itself clearly an addition that the Underground had made themselves, whatever having existed in its place beforehand no longer serving its sole purpose, and having since been discarded.
Up there, it was dark.
“I don’t know why the attic is so Blue. Normally that kind of thing is associated with journeys and the like. Who starts their trip from an attic?” Milo wondered aloud as they came to a stop at the foot of the ladder.
"The sound? Oh, hm, yes. Some years ago, a group of bizarre occultists went around France making windchimes. I'm not sure what, precisely, they were trying to achieve - or indeed if they were able to achieve it at all - but it left the places they were working with very Blue." Niko finished his ascent, coming out onto a landing of dry hardwood and moving into a corridor leading further back into the house. "As for where precisely you are being taken, I don't know the final destination - for purposes of security, you must understand."
Ana spoke up.
"The first jump will take us to America. Then there will be some journey away from the exit site, then another, similar jump will take us somewhere else. I can't say where." said Ana, glancing at Niko.
"Mm." Niko added, a smile growing on his face as they came to another staircase at the rear of the old home, and he began to ascend it. The house creaked around them. The faint ringing of glass upon glass became clearer, sharper, more eager.
On the walls, mould and moss grew in florid patterns. Like outstretched hands.
Birthplace: Somewhere pleasant along the banks of the Pontar, in a rural nowhere between Novigrad and Oxenfurt.
Profession: Intelligence Officer, Temerian Intelligence. Second in Command, Fifth Platoon Blue Stripes Commandos (Formerly).
Appearance: Alan Enfys is of medium height and build, with thick, versatile brown hair and a fast growing beard of a gradually greying colour. His eyes are almost paradoxically soft, intelligent and incredibly perceptive. He’s best described as having a very flexible appearance, but dresses to avoid drawing attention, and to conceal both his form and his scars - though they look like nothing more than the result of careless farm work. He has no particular inherent mannerisms, he’s not memorable, and he smells like whatever he’s wearing. Occasionally, but only occasionally, he has trouble looking people in the eye.
Personality: Alan Enfys is a highly intelligent, deeply perceptive, thoughtful man, whose thoughts are very rarely betrayed by his outwards actions. He is constantly thinking, always assessing the situation, and exhibits a tremendous tendency towards analytical, logical patterns of thought. Despite this he is also quite sensitive, able to pick up intuitively on minute details and social cues, making him reasonably good company and generally quite engaging in conversation - although he is normally reasonably quiet, becoming loud only when drunk, which he is not frequently but enjoys being. He prefers ale from Temeria - more for the memories than for the actual taste, which has occasionally been described as lacking - or wine to drink, and he doesn't smoke as he finds tobacco distasteful and uncomfortable to inhale. It is easy to mistake him for being shy or nervous, as while he does have an attractive smile he seems to use it only very rarely, and he will sometimes have trouble making regular eye contact with people in conversation - though this last part is an identifying behaviour he has taken care to disguise and mitigate. He does enjoy his time alone.
In a professional capacity, he is well demarked by his ability to adapt creatively to stress and new or unforeseen problems, and he does very well under pressure. He enjoys being able to focus on his work, and prefers to give as much of himself to a given job as he has left to give. Alan finds incompetence frustrating, but tries to be patient with people who need to learn, and does his best to be understanding of failures.
Beyond all this, however - or perhaps running below it like a river below a bridge - there is Patriotism. Alan is a nationalist, and has been since he was recruited as a Blue Stripe many years ago, although the sheer intensity of it has waned with time, experience, and trauma. There was truly once an Alan that would have done anything, happily and gladly, for King Foltest; now... well, now he still would.
He was younger back then. Less thoughtful - if not any less smart. He still loves Temeria, and like the rest of his old comrades he still loves the King - but it’s a cynical, hurt kind of love, now. The kind of love you might deny on a bad day. Alan is still loyal, and he still serves his country, and he will until he dies - but sometimes, just sometimes, it is a struggle.
History:
Alan was born a fair while ago. There are no records of when, precisely, but he knows that his birthday was in summer. It is said to have been a beautiful day, one of the rare ones where it seems like the world is finally at peace - well, but for the screaming of his mother, and even that did not last so many hours. His mother was Ola, a young woman whose lot in life had been to accompany her husband on his travels with a trading company as a caravan guard - whose name was Ruaridh, and who came from An Skellige.
It goes without saying that her becoming pregnant on the road had not been something they had planned for, but when the company leader tried to force his father to leave her at the ignominious little backwater village they’d just passed through, his father had threatened to: beat the man half to death, steal his goods, and leave the caravan with her. With the caravan master sufficiently cowed - and with the quality of his work as a Skelliger mercenary to support his father - it seemed as though the company could expect a baby amongst them soon. He was a comparatively easy birth, if not so easy to raise, always getting into trouble and causing mischief - early on in his life it was clear that he was a bright boy, taking things apart to see how they worked, breaking his toys to get a look at their insides and figure out what made them tick. Once, he was given a clockwork soldier as a present - it swung its sword and acted like it was marching, when you wound it up - and it took him about three days to deconstruct the thing.
His childhood was happy, and loving. He remembers relatively little of it.
He stayed with the caravan until he was 7. You see, after a while, having a precocious child in a trading caravan becomes an endeavour too risky to justify.
Alan himself still doesn’t know precisely what happened. The traders had decided to make a stop near Vizima to pick up some of the more intricate artisan’s goods from the capital - stuff like forged weapon parts, machine bits, and whatnot. Perhaps they decided that it would be better for him to stay there, where he could find… an education? A living? Abject poverty and exploitation by criminals?
No. More likely the caravan master had finally decided that Alan’s father’s strongarming was outweighing his use as a guardsman, and hired on replacements - whose first task had been to take care of their predecessor. Or he was killed by a robber in the city. Or by disease.
One way or another, Alan woke up one morning to find that the caravan had left, and that he was on his own in the capital. He has even less idea what could have happened to his mother.
For the next five years he lived in squalor, flitting from squat to squat, avoiding the King’s men and picking pockets. When he was big enough, he and two others would corner inattentive merchants or workers and use knives to pry their coin from them. It wasn’t what he had dreamed of doing, as a child, but it was a living. He tried to get along with the others - Georg and Nils - and largely succeeded. He stole, and fought, and drank, and stole, and fought, and drank.
His life quickly became a peculiar kind of anxious, horrible boring. He was never safe, never satisfied, and only rarely sorry for the things he was doing.
Eventually they joined a gang together.
It was the natural conclusion of the life he was living. The two others he had been living with quickly took to the gang’s shared culture, getting their symbol as a tattoo and donning the rough leathers of the group - who called themselves the Riverdogs, for their engaging in their crimes along the roads near the Pontar, and then using it as an escape route. They loved it. The life of the brigand was somehow glamourous to them, like a big stupid adventure. The leader of the gang - who called himself King, and spoke at length about the virtue of liberty - endorsed this behaviour thoroughly. He gladly put his own shares in the spoils of the jobs they did towards gang nights in brothels and taverns; more than once was the entire group blackout drunk on his coin.
More than once too did they all wake up spread out across the streets of Vizima, just barely in time to escape the morning guard patrols. It was a fun life - if a life that couldn’t possibly have lasted forever - and both Georg and Nils were thoroughly taken with it.
Alan saw wiser.
He knew how these kinds of things ended - with the gang being rounded up and killed, or turning on their junior members - and he was, for the first time, determined not to fall victim to it. His violent apathy was turned into sharp determination when the gang lost three members to an overprepared party of highway guardsmen, and he started taking a more active role in the planning of their heists. Under the charismatic, generous leadership of King, and with the fast mind of the newly committed Alan, their criminal habits only escalated. Rather than simply identify a merchant and pounce all at once, Alan had the smaller members of the gang act as scouts and stalkers, following larger caravans and discreetly observing their habits and security measures with Alan in tow to take notes - as he was one of the few literate members of the party. While the scouts followed their targets, the others practiced the art of combat from horseback, with archers perching on the backs of their brothers’ horses to fire while moving and the horsemen themselves adopting new weapons - even makeshift ones - to replace the repurposed tools and farming equipment they’d been using before.
Alan’s sudden involvement, and his responsibility for their success, meant that he came to the personal attention of the magnetic King. King, whose real name Alan never learned, would take Alan aside during the parties and drunken feasts the gang held after their many new victories. They spoke about philosophy, about faith and religion, and about politics. King was an educated, intelligent man, and it is from him that Alan drew most of his own education during this time - including a very basic understanding of the Elder tongue.
More than that though, it was as though he knew what Alan preferred to do and rather than forcing him to engage with the gang in a way he hated, let him do it. He gave Alan gifts of books and plays, he spoke about them with him, he made him feel like he belonged. For a time Alan even felt like he could identify with the libertine ideology his leader espoused. He still owes his erudition and his creativity to him - it was, after all, King who helped him learn to think outside of the box, to break from routine, to appreciate the value of being unpredictable.
However, this shift in tactics, this twist of fortune, this alteration of the proverbial battlefield - it was a double edged sword. Alan knew they would come, and he took measures - often effective ones - to mislead their pursuers when they did, but he was well aware that as the Riverdogs became a more and more credible threat to larger traders, they would come more and more into the notice of the Crown. More worryingly, their unique adaptations of classical small unit tactics meant that with every convoy they raided they were leaving unique clues and hints behind, for their pursuers to trace them with. The usual model of banditry is not sustainable, and allows for very little growth, but it’s commonplace enough that tracking one particular group becomes very difficult until they develop particular behaviours or appetites - but they weren’t just bandits any more, they weren’t following the usual model.
Unbeknownst to the gang, a platoon from the Temerian standing army, composed of experienced, professional soldiers under the command of Captain Markus Novak, had been tracking them for months.
It would eventually turn out that the Riverdogs had managed to kill a minor nobleman during a raid some months ago, and while he had not been politically important in the wider scheme of things, his death was still notable. That had been their death warrant, the event responsible for marking them as a target not only worth pursuing, but one that needed pursuing.
Captain Novak had studied their tactics, mapped their normal range of activities, and deduced that they were using the Pontar to flee the scene of their crimes once they were done. He had already known that the Dogs were using primitive cavalry in their attacks, so he knew too that the boat or boats they escaped on would need to be large enough to take horses - up to ten of them, in fact - as well as the men. It was a simple matter to chart an area of the Pontar that was likely to conceal a dock or pontoon, then send his scouts to identify the bandit camp.
On the 4th of January in the year 1245, after three years of violence and flight from prosecution, the story of the Riverdogs was brought to a swift and final close. At 4am, with most of the gang still asleep and drunk from the night before when the had been celebrating another successful robbery, the troops struck. Alan woke up abruptly, having been a light sleeper anyway, to an infantry charge from two separate angles. The Temerians had been given ample time to prepare, they were better trained and equipped, and they had the element of surprise from two fronts. The fighting was over before it began, a foregone conclusion for the ages. About half the gang were killed then and there, the other half was taken prisoner with Alan among them.
Once the prisoners were taken back to Vizima it seemed for all the world like they were due a public hanging - and indeed, that is what happened to some of them - but before they met the garroter they met the Sheriff.
With the annexation of Ebbing some years earlier by the insidious forces of the Nilfgaardian Empire, all the nordling peoples were beginning to ramp up recruitment for the armies, pressing peasants to train for war and expanding the standing retinues. The faintest of rumours already existed that, in the years to come, King Foltest would call upon his vassals and raise an army to meet Nilfgaard.
To that end, petty and dangerous criminals alike were - when the circumstances were right - being given a choice; die at the rope, or live in the army.
Alan could not understand why the others chose death - especially King.
The last words that the gang leader ever said to Alan were on the day of his execution, from the gallows platform;
“I was never meant for chains. If that’s the only way to live, then I just won’t live. It’s better by far to die free.”
Then he threw his head back and laughed at the crowd.
“King is dead. Long live King”
Of course, it was easy for Alan to disagree with that sentiment - especially from the distance away he was stood, still bound and under guard with the others who had chosen life as their leader’s body dropped, stopped, and jerked - but he had to admit, there was something to be said for dying as yourself.
Still. Better to keep breathing.
War school was rough, given that they were in training as conscripts for a prototypical Poor Fucking Infantry, the ultimate shitlords of the melee, screwed by destiny and fate from both ends. Of all the men in this unit about half were criminals, the others were desperate peasants who had been told there would be bread. Even the criminals were mostly nonviolent.
It was him, Georg, and two others named Keillor and Jan. Georg was tempered now by his brush with death, and slept only very poorly if at all. Keillor and Jan were brave and serious men, older than either Georg or Alan - they had been Riverdogs for a long time, and had taken the death of the gang hard. During the proceedings that led to their conscription Alan had openly been given half the credit for their success, which both brought him to the attention of the Sergeant Major and made him their de facto clique leader. Together, the four of them were the most experienced fighters and best team workers in the entire Public Provisional Corps.
The Sgt Major in charge of their training was a gruff and unpleasant man named Peters. He smelt bizarre and bitter at almost all times - in a way that was not entirely unlike pipe smoke, but which didn’t carry its taste so much on the wind. He described himself as a veteran of some such war or other, but was always reluctant to actually give any details or proof - the gang pretty quickly pegged him as exaggerating his achievements for impact, even if he was still clearly experienced. It was a ruse that worked on most of the peasants, and he commanded at least their obedience if not truly their respect.
Alan and the others made it their personal mission to press him as far as they could without their sentence being revoked to hanging. They needed something to do, and it was precisely the ideal combination of funny and easy to trip the other recruits up onto the Major’s table during mess, or leave dog crap outside his tent in the night, or steal his ale and replace it with… well, worse quality ale. When Peters’ suspicion of active interference was raised at long last, Alan even made sure to plant what little evidence they hadn’t already drank in another squad’s tent - he even dabbed a little of the beer onto their clothes, to make them smell like they’d been drinking it.
It was a far cry from their previous pastimes, and they were still miserable, but the thin, watery joy they got out of it was enough to keep them going during boot camp.
Their discretion, their cunning, and their brutal dirty fighting; it was what eventually got them noticed by a more discreet kind of watcher, after almost a full year of training and garrison duty.
By the time a week had passed, all four of the last River Dogs had been transferred out of there supposedly to another unit, and the limited-but-extant paperwork regarding that transfer had been lost in a terrible, highly specific fire, which had managed to burn nothing else at all. Functionally, all four of them no longer existed. If anyone asked questions, then whoever they were asking had never met them before, didn’t know who they were, and - if pressed - shrugged, and suggested that they must have deserted.
They had not deserted.
Instead, late one night in the dead of winter, at the end of their training, they were approached.
A fairly unassuming man with grey stubble and no uniform cornered them as the evening wound down, and offered quite sternly to buy them some decent ale if they’d only accompany him for a conversation. The other three were initially reluctant, but Alan knew what opportunity looked like, and it looked like a way off the camp for some beer.
On the way to the tavern Alan busied himself concocting a plan to overpower their escort and escape; after all, one man could only do so much against four experienced assailants, right? But he never got the chance to put it into action - for one thing, it quickly became obvious that the man leading them was not alone, and that he had friends in the streets around them.
For another thing, both the beer and the offer they ended up getting were a lot better than any of them had been expecting.
In the smoky, humid, darkness of the snug, a man was waiting for them. His name was Vernon, and he only very rarely smiled.
The Blue Stripes were an elite unit of Temeria’s most dangerous and most diehard fighting patriots. They were entrusted with the most difficult tasks, often given to them personally by the King, often to be conducted with the absolute bare minimum of resources. Or less.
The work was brutal, risky, and often unrewarding; but it meant a bizarre sort of relative security, away from the meat grinder of the standard infantry, and it certainly suited the type of work the boys were familiar with. Though they had initially gone along with it out of a desire to find opportunities to escape, the sheer intensity of the training left them without the time to find one - and by the time they had liberty enough to find one, they’d gotten too far stuck into the Blue Stripes mentality to seriously consider backing out. It helped that Roche took good care to separate them across different squads for their training; you can’t make an escape plan if you can’t talk to eachother, after all.
It was like being back in the Riverdogs again. All for one, one for all. The Blue Stripes were truly brothers - only even better, it wasn’t motivated by greed or lust or teeth clenched teamwork for a mercenary end; these men and women loved Temeria, and they adored the King. They still got drunk together, they still fought together, they still earned a bad reputation - to those few who still knew they existed - together, but now they were serving something greater than themselves. It wasn’t nearly as bad as they’d thought it would be. Sometimes, on the really good days, they forgot about being criminals a little bit; the Blue Stripes made them feel like they actually belonged.
None of them, least of all Alan - as wise and sharp and intelligent as he was - realised how much they’d been missing that.
After six months they were given the opportunity to be together again for the rest of their training, and they took it without question. They were given more free time, they weren’t watched as closely by their comrades during the downtime they got, and they were given the uniform and weapons to carry with them permanently - at long last.
Alan had figured that it would be a test of sorts, to see if they would try to make a break for it once they were in a position to. He wasn’t sure what would happen if they tried to. Logically, you’d want to cut the escapees down before they could go and wreak havoc with their specialist training and experience. Logically, you’d want to keep the knowledge of your secret training camp just that; secret. Logically, you wouldn’t let them walk out.
But Alan couldn’t see anything set up to catch them if they tried. He was a smart, analytical, perceptive soldier, well suited to this kind of work - or indeed, this kind of escape attempt. No eyes followed them when they walked about in the evening. None of their comrades looked twice when one of them turned towards the gates. Nobody questioned where they were if they spent too long out of view, in the latrine, or simply hiding.
Alan even had his brothers make preparations to leave. He had them steal food and water, cut a hole in the fence, watch the guard shifts for weaknesses. They were ready to escape, and still, nothing.
Roche would have let them go.
Alan could not recall a time in his life when he had been trusted by anyone who wasn’t going to hang with him if they were caught. It was a surprising, pleasant, obliging feeling. They weren’t conscripts any more, they weren’t being forced into this life, they were finally being given a choice. Legally speaking, the choice might have been illegal, but it was one they could make freely.
The Blue Stripes saw them as equals. The Blue Stripes saw them as Blue Stripes.
Which meant that the King did too.
So they stayed.
Alan went to Vernon Roche’s quarters personally to inform him that they were thankful for the freedom they’d been given, and that they’d considered the alternative, but found loyalty more worth their while. It was one of the only times Alan ever saw him smile during their training.
From then onwards, their schooling focused on the military theory behind guerilla warfare, the finer points of covert operations, and the use of improvised weaponry in the field of war. They learnt to work seamlessly as a team in order to destroy infrastructure, neutralise key enemy support staff and officers, and confront threats militarily their superior in a pattern of assymetrical warfare that enabled the overcoming of targets many times their own strength by use of guile and deception as well as straight violence. All members of the unit were trained in both a variety of close quarters fighting techniques, and with a number of ranged weapons, from the utilitarian and deadly sling to the mighty longbow. A general education in civilian subjects was supplied on the sides, with each squad member receiving a different apprenticeship in a different trade, to provide them with the background knowledge of civilian life that many lacked, as well as valuable accessory skill sets.
Which is the point at which Alan Enfys met Alara Wystwyth.
She was a sorceress, on assignment from the research chapter of the Brotherhood of Sorcerers to a hospital in Novigrad, performing medical duties and looking into the origins of an unusually nasty strain of an otherwise normal illness.
He was, to most people, apprenticed to an engineer. The hospital was undergoing some renovations, and his ‘master’ wanted the Sorceress’s keen opinion on the designs they had. The pair of them were quite immediately taken with eachother, although Alan certainly tried to hide it. They would have several more professional conversations in the weeks to come, supposedly at the behest of his architect teacher, until the man made it clear that he was trying to give Alan an opportunity with her more than he really needed exact clarifications on chamberpot drains and their required diameters.
He asked her to join him for a…
He faltered, when he asked her to join him for a drink. Do sorceresses drink ale, usually? Do they prefer wine? Would they be happiest drinking whiskey? Do they need it to be as old as they might be? Should it be sweet, or bitter, or warm, or cold? Do they drink the same stuff as sorcerers, or are they somehow different? Was she allergic to anything?
Oh, what if she didn’t drink alcohol?
She replied that she would love for him to join her in the sharing of a bottle of Schnapps. She would even buy it herself.
Once the job he was doing was done, that is.
She was not the first woman Alan had ever had feelings for, or even the first woman he’d had strong feelings for - but she was probably the first woman he would ever come to love. She was intelligent and engaging in conversation, she spoke at length and with passion about niche subjects and bizarre things that she found interesting, she shared with him the things that she loved, like she was eager to impart some of herself to him. Alara was an academic, a scholar, a genius. She was a doctor, a healer, a compassionate carer. She enjoyed speaking - but she loved to hear him talk, too.
Alan enjoyed listening. Very much. Talking? He enjoyed less. He listened to the magic of her voice for maybe five years.
They went for walks along the river, they went to libraries and looked at old books, they worked together where their skillsets permitted it. They were not always on good terms, of course - she seemed disapproving of his growing patriotism, and upset by how ready he was to do violence for something as small as nationalism, and he in turn was frustrated by her for it. She would come and go, especially once her formal assignment to Temeria was over, and even when he had the good luck to be residing within Vizima again she was not always there - sometimes even when she was, they did not see each other; she told him he was too good natured for the work he was doing, that he should leave the Stripes if he wanted to be with her. It never held up for long, but she did keep coming back to it. She seemed convinced that he was going to get himself killed for nothing - and he could never understand how something as great as Temeria could seem like nothing to her, no matter how long lived she was.
Nonetheless, he was careful not to seem like he was acting differently in front of the other Blue Stripes, and he kept his joy to himself for the most part - but Gods, Vernon absolutely knew.
If he had been born a sorcerer, he’d have asked her to marry him. If he’d been born a sorcerer, gone to Ban Ard, the question of his loyalties would never have been asked. He’d have been free to be all hers - which, perhaps, he did not realise was what he truly wanted.
But he was a soldier instead, glad to serve, happy to fight.
Deployment became the interim for periods of on and off courtship. When he had leave he would visit her, or catch glimpses of her in the crowded tavern his brothers frequented, and follow; but after his training was over he was sent out as a scout and a soldier more often than he wasn’t.
Alan couldn’t help but think he must be the luckiest man in the world. He’d gone from being a two bit criminal with a head for tactics to a member of one of Temeria’s most valuable combat ready units. He’d gone from comparative loneliness and a dependency on debauchery for his social life to a young man involved with one of the most wise, intelligent, charming, beautiful women in existence - at least as far as he was concerned, the other sorcerers’ opinions of Miss Wystwyth didn’t matter a damn to him.
He’d gone from nothing, to something. He had even almost forgotten King, the first man who ever understood him.
No major conflicts, no great wars, not until the time came when Nilfgaard marched on Cintra - but enough busy work and special interests for the Blue Stripes to stay needed. Anything for Temeria, anything to keep the kingdom safe, anything to permit the continued work of the sorceress. With great purpose and skill did Alan Enfys earn his stripes on the tasks his squad was given by Vernon Roche - although Georg had been assigned to another team, Keillor and Jan had remained with Alan, and earned their place on the field too. Things were good, and looking better by the day.
Like all upward trends, it was never to last.
As War, clad in black and gold, marched towards the North, the King made the decision to deploy the Blue Stripes - at least in part - toward the South. Though the armies of Temeria were not yet ready for deployment, and much debate was still to be had as to just how far North the Nilfgaardians were intent on coming, the Temerian Intelligence Service were speculating that it would fit the pattern already shown for Nilfgaard to rush Sodden and secure it as an advancing point to take the rest of the North; the role of the Blue Stripes from 1661 onwards would be to travel discreetly south of Sodden and use whatever means necessary to delay the advancement of the black and gold banners.
The news of their deployment came abruptly, but in the month before it did, Alara took him aside whenever she could; not for loving, or for comfort, but for teaching.
To this day he doesn’t know how she felt it coming, or if she’d somehow known where he was going before he did, or what must have been going through her head - especially since he would always have been doomed to die before her anyway. But she did.
He was a quick student, with a powerful mind and an intuitive grasp of abstract things, and a gifted and dedicated tutor - but even he took most of that month to learn even one sign.
“Again. Cross your arms above your head, like swords bracing against a powerful blow. In your mind, picture a great shield, invisible and impenetrable, ahead of the point where they meet.”
She threw a rock at him, and he grunted as he slammed his hands together at the wrist to meet it.
“Fuck!” He yelped as the stone met the top of his head. Alara winced too - if a little less than he did. “This isn’t helping. I’m no wizard, I can’t do magic, especially not when I’ve got fuckin’ stones being chucked at me.” He snapped, as he sank to the floor and ran a hand through his hair to check the point of impact.
Yes. He was bleeding.
More than that, his body ached and burned with strain. His mind was wilding at him, turning over itself with incoherent thought and turbulent imagery; he saw the sun, he saw the walls of the castle, he saw Alara, he saw the wilds and the rivers and the trees and the woods, and violet-purple blossoms on the forest floor. He could taste wine.
No, he could taste blood.
He pressed his hands against his eyes, as if it could block out the things he was seeing.
Alan knew he was neither, not Witcher nor Mage. Magic was not meant for him, not in any form.
“Alan.” Came her voice, as her hand came to rest on his neck.
He paused.
He moved his hand to rest atop hers, grasping gently for the soft contact.
For ten minutes they sat in silence, waiting for the racing damage in his head to subside, or at least to quiet.
“I… I don’t think I can do it. I’m sorry.” He muttered softly, turning away from her.
She reached out with her free hand, pulled his gaze back to her with her fingertips against his cheek, and looked him in his weary bloodshot eyes.
“Most people have no stomach for magic, most of them not even for the Signs used by Witchers. It drains them, it takes up too much of their mind. You aren’t those people.”
He shook his head.
“If I weren’t, I’d have done it by now.” it came almost more as a sigh than as words.
It was her turn to pause.
“I can’t let you go out there with nothing.” She said at long last.
“I don’t have nothing, Alara. I have brothers. We have armour, swords and shields, axes and bows. We have teamwork, coordination, we have our perception, we have the element of surprise. It’s all we need - all we’ve ever needed. It’s not exactly safe work, I’ll grant you, but,” he chuffed, “neither is living in the city.”
With that, Alara Wystwyth stood again, and turned away from him, her dress flowing as she moved across the room.
“I can’t let you go out there with nothing from me. For me, people like you come by once in a lifetime. If you won’t step back from this barbaric war, I want you to at least let me do this for you.”
With a groan, and a lurch, he stood up. His knees felt weak, his head was pounding again, and he felt like he might be sick.
But if it was really that important to her…
“Ok. Fine. Again.”
Heliotrope was a slightly rarer sign, more situationally useful than most of the others, and difficult to use. When it was successful it was a powerful but incredibly draining defensive technique, and it had other applications beyond simple combat, but it certainly wasn’t the kind of thing a normal person could use regularly.
When Alara let loose her stone at Alan, his arms met in front of him in a cross, and his mind roared with the heat of the sun. They had been trying for hours, almost daily for a full month, with no success.
Until now.
For a brief instant, a beautiful half second, the space before Alan’s eyes was full of light.
When it faded, as quickly as it’d come, the thrown stone had struck the wall on the far side of the room.
And Alara was smiling.
The Blue Stripes departed for the South in the week after that. Four platoons made they way down to Sodden in 1262, splitting up and traveling to Cintra, Hochenbuz, with the remaining two staying in the area around Sodden hill. Alan was placed as a First Officer in the Fifth Platoon, whose posting was in Cintra. They arrived shortly before Nilfgaard did, but hadn’t expected a significant Imperial presence in Cintra - everyone who’d thought Nilfgaard would try to take the North had thought they would rush Sodden, so the bulk of the Blue Stripes had gone to lay preparations around it rather than divide themselves around the rest of the south.
Needless to say, things did not go very well.
The detachment sent to Sodden were forced to abandon their traps and hides in order to reinforce the vastly outdone 5th Platoon, once it became clear that Nilfgaard wasn’t coming their way for a while - but in the mean time, the 5th Platoon were getting stuck in to the Nilfgaardian army.
While a commando platoon of twenty men is not necessarily enough weight to turn the tables of a great battle, such as at Marnadal - and once the depletion of the Cintran forces was complete there was surely no way to save the country overall - there was still plenty to be done in the way of disruption an destruction. Siege equipment was sabotaged, supplies were burned, officers were found with their throats cut come morning. Alan was the eyes of the company, identifying ideal spots for ambushes against supply trains and planning for the inevitable Nilfgaardian retaliations. They were even present during the Massacre of Cintra itself, albeit not for very long and not to any great change in outcome.
As the massacre in Cintra drew to a close and the brutal occupation began, their role shifted once again, and their time was divided between finding opportunities to free the few prisoners of war Nilfgaard had taken, engaging Nilfgaardian patrol units to stop them finding refugee convoys, and desperately trying to identify their brothers from the reinforcement companies.
Reinforcements would not come. The other platoons had been recalled to Sodden Hill after Cintra fell so quickly. Alan would later discover that two of them had carried on to rejoin King Foltest’s army directly, while the Fourth Platoon had stayed to leave traps for the advancing Nilfgaardians - and that they were bound to the same destiny awaiting Alan’s own team.
The Vrihedd Brigade was that destiny.
Elven cavalry experts, the Vrihedd brigade were a radical group of war criminals whose sole purpose was to bring suffering to the Nordlings, and they were good at their jobs; when Nilfgaardian Command tasked them with hunting down the freshly identified Blue Stripes 5 Platoon, they accepted the task with outright glee. It would be a game of cat and mouse for the ages, the results of which would play into the beginnings of the bitter enmity between Vernon Roche and the Scoia’tael in years to come. For three long months, the light cavalry of the elves and the specialist infantry of the Blue Stripes were engaged in a duel of wits; the Vrihedd would set up a target, something attractive and poorly defended, but something subtle enough to escape notice for what it really was; the Blue Stripes would either identify and ignore it, or hit it from an unpredictable angle and escape through rough terrain cavalry couldn’t easily follow them over. The Vrihedd Brigade would search the woodlands for wherever the Blue Stripes had made camp; the Blue Stripes would camp in caves or seek refuge in small towns instead.
But the game went both ways.
The Blue Stripes would keep making holes for refugees to get through, and the Vrihedd Brigade would run the civilians down from horseback. The Blue Stripes would assassinate one officer, and two more would step forward to take his place. The Blue Stripes would destroy one caravan of supplies sent to relieve an occupying outpost, and the elves would go hunting on horseback, using the spoils to make up for the losses.
Things were evenly enough balanced, for a little while - but anyone can be outsmarted.
By the time three months was up, the captain of the Vrihedd detachment that had been assigned to pursue the 5th Platoon had finished analysing their ambush tactics, and made a decision on how to engage them. He requisitioned the use of the 104th Black Infantry Division, had them hide inside the cargo crates on a fake supply train, and then followed with his cavalry dressed up as standard Nilfgaardian mounted guards about twice the normal distance behind.
The Blue Stripes launched their attack on a narrow road in a dense wood, striking the men attached to the caravan with a volley from the banks alongside the road, then advancing on foot; the woods were successful in preventing a cavalry charge, but the Vrihedd brigade advanced nonetheless and were able to catch the commandos in the middle of unloading the crates. When the Vrihedd captain sounded his horn, the Black Infantry burst out of the crates before the Blue Stripes had a chance to react, and the fighting began.
There was a roar and a rush of hot air as the barrel of lantern oil they’d nearly liberated went up in flames. Alan wasn’t sure who, or what, had set the damn thing on fire, but it didn’t matter. They were being advanced on by a pack of rabid elves in black armour from one direction, and the Black Infantry had just thrown themselves out of crates like some sort of horrific, demented jack in the box.
He took a step back and braced himself against his back leg as an elf swung a blade at him, then kicked off with a thrust of his own and caught the beast in the stomach with his dagger. Alan didn’t wait to see the results, he pulled the knife back and thrust again, this time for its throat. He felt the body seize, then start to weaken, and pushed it away from him as he turned just in time to meet the next attacker.
As the Black Infantry swordsman swung a combat axe at him, he ducked, and moved inside the arc of his swing like a wolf leaping at an injured beast.
The other man took an alarmed step back and raised the wooden handle of his axe to block the well-telegraphed slash from the sword in Alan’s offhand, and then promptly tripped and fell backwards when he realised Alan had stepped on his foot. Alan dipped down, almost onto one knee, and put the dagger through the eyeslits in his opponent’s helmet. When his movements faded from struggle to twitch, and thick red started to leak out of the metal frame surrounding his head into the dark, rich soil below them, Alan got up and looked around once again.
The men were engaged with the Black Infantry already, and the first few of the Vrihedd had already made their way into the battle; if they didn’t pull back and keep the enemy on one side at the very least, they’d all be cut down before they could do anything at all. A forest of leafless birch surrounded them, dense enough to make mounted combat unfeasible but loose enough to run through on foot, a field of white standing on muddy, bloody earth.
“Blue Stripes! With me!” He roared above the noise of the flames and steel, planting one boot in front of the other and breaking into a run along the road. Of the 20 they’d started with, 14 now remained, and their captain had been amongst those killed first in the initial wave of surprise attackers. Men began to break away from their fights and flee up the road, leaving bodies and weapons in their wake - for as numerous and as professional as the Black Infantry may be, they were attacking from a disadvantage, and they were no match man-for-man for the Blue Stripes Commandos.
The black and gold of the Nilfgaardian general infantry were just about depleted as the footbound elven cavaliers caught up, moving fast and light, about a hundred feet down the road. Killing men who were tumbling out of wooden boxes wearing unwieldy armour and carrying heavy weapons was one thing, dealing with the fanatics now chasing them was something else.
Spots of red spattered across Alan’s face as the man next to him turned to look behind them at the wrong moment, and caught an arrow in the throat. Alan knew better, and kept running. The burning wrecks of the wagons and carts behind them would keep pursuit from horseback at bay for a while, but if they couldn’t catch their prey on foot then the elves would circle back and get their horses nonethless - and then there would be little hope of escape, for the beastly Aen Seidhe were adept and uncanny trackers on top of their skill as soldiers.
Over the course of the next ten minutes a series of skirmishes with the Vrihedd Brigade would half their remaining numbers, and separate most of the remaining survivors, but they would nonetheless escape.
In the days to come, some of the Blue Stripes were caught and killed, some of them were able to reunite and escape together, and some of them tried to make their way back to Temeria on their own. Alan spent almost a week hiding alone in the freezing forests of Cintra, dodging Nilfgaardian patrols and running from the elves, before he was eventually found - not by the Stripes, not by a patrol, but by a lone rider.
A young elf, face fixed with a maniacal grin, atop a horse. Alan wasn’t sure how she’d snuck up on him like that, but it didn’t really matter any more. He hadn’t eaten in days, he’d taken to melting snow in his mouth to quench his thirst, he was beginning to waver. Jan and Keillor were both dead, Georg may well have followed.
She was just the latest thing to go wrong for him, and if he really thought about it, she wasn’t even the worst..
Alan looked up at her with dismay - he’d been trying to make his way further north, and the forest here was sparser and clearer. Clear enough for a charge.
“Temerian dog.” The elf woman growled in elder speech, spitting at the ground and gripping harder at the spear hanging by her side as her horse cantered about itself, pacing anxiously.
Alan’s hand came to the hilt of his sword, his ears pricked.
“I speak Elder too.” He said in slow, faltering elder speech. He had learned a little from books, from King, long ago - and had it consolidated with a certain sorceress, not so long ago. If he could keep her talking-
“Good dog. Clever, aren’t you?” She threw her head back and laughed at him as he replied. “Smart, to speak like that. Smart enough to know you’re going to die, then?” Her eyes lit up with hatred and her horse took a step forward.
“Smart enough to fight back.” Alan growled halfheartedly back at her.
Her laugh faded, her face grew hard, her body tensed.
“Good.” She said in common, and charged.
She levelled her spear at him like a lance as she kicked the sides of her horse and built up speed, but Alan was fast too, even on a bad day, and threw himself to the side to dodge it. Her horse kept going, circling around through the trees, as Alan rolled onto his feet and stood up.
The elf came at him again, dipping the lance a little lower, leaning down a little further, frustrated that she hadn’t simply speared him the first time - or, indeed, that he hadn’t turned and run.
Alan hit the ground again, the spear just brushing his back as he planting himself against the snow, and the elf screamed at him in rage.
She circled back again, leaning lower and lower, bracing the spear under her arm in a crude mimickry of a real knight. Her eyes were burning like coals as she practically dangled off the side of the saddle, holding on only by one hand, and she made her final mistake.
This time, as the speartip reached him, Alan steadied himself and braced-
And then his arms met eachother in front of him, in a cross, and his mind roared with the strain of primitive magic and intense focus.
Heliotrope.
The elf registered a moment of confusion as her spear pushed up against the instantaneous golden shield of Heliotrope, and then panic as the force of the collision threw her from her horse, and shattered her spear.
Alan’s vision blurred as the effort of heliotrope staggered him - but he could see well enough to know that the elf was already trying to scrabble up from the snow and draw her knife. Her bravado and hatred was gone, replaced by fear and anxiety and panic. He saw through her, now, saw that she only wanted to live.
“Stay back!” She cried out, in common.
“So you can get your friends to come back and cut my head off?” Alan retorted as he staggered towards her, gaining on her as she slid back onto her arse in the mud and show.
“Stay back, I said!” She finally produced a knife and pointed it at him - but it was clear she was much better on horseback than on foot, and Alan’s head was already beginning to clear.
Alan’s face hardened further. Grim determination set into his heels. He knew what had to be done.
“What would you tell them I’d done to you? What lies would you spin?” He forced through clenched teeth. He’d thought he’d had enough of killing for one war, enough of loss and pain. He’d thought it was over.
Her jaw dropped, she shook her head, tears welled up in her eyes.
Alan averted his gaze for a moment, and he swallowed hard. It tasted like bile when he did.
“Doesn’t matter.” He spat.
He lashed out with his sword, sending her dagger spinning away into the snow. She tried to crawl backwards, her legs kicking in the snow, but he was already atop her with sword in hand. The struggle was wild, but brief, for he was stronger than her.
He hesitated only an instant when the second came - and her death came even quicker than that.
His location remained hidden, his path out of Cintra stayed clear.
He buried her in a shallow grave, seeing as he had the spare time to. Then he stole her horse and went home.
Fake names, cover stories, clever lies. The Nilfgaardian occupation had started to take hold in almost all the territory he trekked through, and he eventually had to set the horse free for fear that someone would recognise its tackle and gear, but his progress was at least steady. Alan had never seen himself as an especially talented liar, or a master of intrigue - and indeed none of his behaviour on the journey home was necessarily evidence to that effect - but it was at this point that he first used the name Karl.
He took great care and especial pains to avoid being seen as anything more than a traveler, and that included acting in a manner that an experienced soldier hiding out in enemy territory simply never would. Alan would be lying if he said that he didn’t enjoy his drink, but it wasn’t necessarily because he enjoyed being drunk that he did - Karl on the other hand would drink anything, and was perfectly happy to drink alone.
Nobody wants to deal with a grumpy drunk vagrant. Not until they start pissing on the floor.
It was rudimentary and crude, as far as cover stories go - that he was Karl, from Kaedwen, who used to farm sugarbeet but took a gamble on selling and breeding horses instead, and who lost his farm doing so - but because anyone who was still looking for him was looking for a vicious guerilla fighter and not a spy, it worked.
Alan made it back to Temeria about six months before the battle of Sodden Hill, and the war’s ending. He found out that his comrades had rejoined the army and gone on to fight, and that he had basically just missed them. Georg had actually survived, stunningly, although he had also rejoined the regular army.
Alan didn’t mind not being there. Not at all. He wasn’t happy about any of it, but he wasn’t sad for having gotten away from it. Alara had been at least partially right - although he’d always known she was. Special forces have bad survival rates.
He knew that when he signed up.
He was sitting alone in the pub the Blue Stripes had always gone to, with a tall cup of strong wine and a sinking heart, when his destiny threw him another twist.
“If you don’t stop for breath, you’ll drown.”
Alan didn’t bother looking up. He didn’t know who it was and he didn’t want to. He stuck his nose back into the cup and finished the wine instead, before standing up to go and get another.
As he pushed his way towards the bar, the voice followed him.
“Alan. I know who you are.”
“Course you do. Fucking wonder that anyone doesn’t.”
A hand on his shoulder.
Alan turned around and put himself right in the other man’s personal space. He was thin, weaselly, with a knowing smirk and a shiny bald head.
“Don’t touch me.”
The other man retracted his hand.
“I’ve read your reports. I know what happened in Cintra. I know what you were doing down there.”
Alan’s face contorted unhandsomely into a vicious snarl as he stabbed his finger drunkenly into the other man’s chest.
“You don’t know shit.”
“I do! I’ve done similar work myself.”
“How the fuck did you-“
“- get the reports? Information is my job. It was my department that gave your group the intelligence to go down there with in the first place.”
Alan stopped, the snarl on his lips dropping away to confusion.
Then to a grimace.
“So it was your fault?”
“That you were probably responsible for setting back Nilfgaard’s schedule by a whole day and a half between the lot of you? That you killed or were responsible for killing well over a thousand of their men, per platoon? Or that you kept the notorious Vrihedd Brigade out of the fighting for three months?”
“That we all fucking died.”
The other man stopped, and paused. His smirk faded.
“Yes. That’s our fault too.”
Alan stopped too.
He turned and put his cup down at the bar, and the innkeeper refilled it.
“Why are you here.”
Not a question. A statement, carrying weight, like an ultimatum. Speak up or fuck off.
“My name is Thaler. I represent Temerian Intelligence. I’ve been advised that you would be an asset to my organisation, as it were. Maybe you could have a hand in helping us keep your friends out of trouble next time. Maybe get the chance to serve Temeria in a different sort of way.”
Alan raised his refilled cup to his lips. Before he drank, he spoke, keeping eye contact with Thaler.
“Go on.”
Thaler nodded, and the smirk came back.
“The Blue Stripes Commando 5th Platoon have already been registered as recombined with the remnants of the 4th and 3rd Platoons, after all three suffered significant losses during the war. You in particular are not listed amongst the survivors in any platoon.” Thaler sidled up to the bar himself, and was promptly handed another cup of wine by the oddly compliant barman. “I’ve got the blessing of Vernon Roche in this. You’re down as killed in action.”
Alan slowly turned back to his drink, and then nodded.
“I’ll have to think about it.” He slurred a little.
Thaler nodded in return.
“Course you do. I’ll come back in a few days.”
Thaler drained his cup, and turned to leave.
“Wait. Thaler.”
“Hm?”
Alan swallowed.
“Why me?”
Thaler shrugged.
“You tell me, Karl.”
It was more complicated than just that, of course. A generic fake name and a story about horse related bankruptcy are not the kinds of things that guarantee competence as a spy - but the ability to come up with those things while running from Nilfgaard, half starved, and freezing to death… that’s the sign of at least an apt mind. There were other things too, like his history of playing mind games with his superiors before joining the Blue Stripes, and his flexibility as a bandit before that.
The work was interesting, it was a valuable and versatile skill set, and it was another way to serve his country; but really, Alan couldn’t stand the idea of just walking away from the war completely. Not while his brothers were still out there. Not while he had a chance to help.
He was waiting for Thaler, stone sober, when the bald, shrewd man got back.
Training took 6 months, and it came more naturally to him than sword fighting ever did. The arts of blending in, of slipping below notice, of muffling your footsteps and disguising your face; it was something he had already known parts of, like a painting he had started working on years ago, and was just applying colour to now. He struggled for a while with making contacts and recruiting agents of his own - but he was smart, and adaptable.
He was deployed shortly after the battle of Sodden Hill, down into what was left of the Nilfgaardian occupation in the south. His duties were initially simple, reporting on Nilfgaard’s industrialisation efforts and agricultural capacity while posing as an innkeeper - until about seven months into the deployment itself, when he received orders to manoeuvre himself into a position where he could interact with the nobility.
Using some of the funds he’d been able to raise as an innkeeper, he sponsored a group of stonemasons who had been contracted by the local Lord to furnish his castle - itself a poor affair that he had simply been bequeathed after the war - with an extension. He asked to join in the effort, as he’d had some experience as an engineer’s apprentice some time ago, and given his generous donations the masons were happy to have him.
For three months he laboured with them, taking notes on the layout of the keep’s interior, observing the behaviour of the Lord himself. Lord Falhoorn was an arrogant and disinvolved man, who looked down on the lower classes and had an unjustified fear of betrayal. There was no way Alan, posing as Karl, would get in with him.
His son, however…
Friedrich Falhoorn, son of Lord Josef Falhoorn, was an adventurous, roguish, foolhardy young man. He was more than slightly charming, enjoyed taking risks, and had a particular fondness for cheaper spirits than his station should really have been able to afford.
So, one day, Alan brought a flask of whisky with him to work. He was careful to conceal it from the Lord, and careful not to conceal it from the Lord’s son. Quickly enough, Friedrich joined in with the drinking, and shortly thereafter was drunk enough to be suggestible.
Alan invited him to come back to the inn he ran in the evening, and from that point onwards the noble incognito was a semi regular customer. He would bring some of his friends, they would get drunk, and they would talk about all sorts of nonsense most of the time - but the more comfortable they got, the more sensitive the topics they spoke of became. Matters of finance, land, politics, and loyalty.
And war.
Eventually they would invite their good friend Karl to their fathers’ parties. He had proven himself friendly, useful, and fun, and so he was welcome to come and drink with them in their own homes - so long as he brought the wine with him, and dressed well enough to not embarrass them.
Over the next few months, Alan was able to gain access to some of the most sensitive parts of this noble family’s lives, as well as make friends with many of their peers. He was usually introduced as a merchant or an entrepreneur rather than a simple tavern keeper, placing him in a safe spot where he was considered acceptable social company for his supposed wealth, but not competition or a threat due to his status as a commoner. He would find the vulnerable in this class, the people who felt isolated or threatened, the people who weren’t suited to their lifestyle, and he would become their relief. Sons who didn’t want the responsibility of their position, daughters who didn’t want to be married off like cattle sold, grandmothers scared of their growing irrelevance, and servants - oh, especially servants - who knew they could be replaced.
From this position he cultivated a small network of agents, many of whom never truly knew who they were working for, whose ultimate purpose was to feed information back to Temeria. He would still get involved in the field work, he kept his skills sharp, and he learned the benefits of theft and forgery nonetheless - but his principal purpose was to be the heart of the web he had spun.
Even when the call finally came for him to go home, that web was still solidly in place.
And when the call *did* come, it was for a most unusual assignment indeed, with one of Foltest’s bastards.
But then he had certainly been missing home.
Skills:
Close Combat; The Blue Stripes Commandos were and are the masters of asymmetrical warfare, striking unexpectedly and rapidly, fighting viciously and unconventionally - and as a son of their ranks, Alan remains adept in the art of unceremonious murder. His preferred weapon is a longsword, but he is flexible.
Stealth and Discretion; Always the better part of valour, this skillset is the result of his training as a soldier and his life as a spy. When appropriately attired and equipped he can pass unseen by most, and unrecognised by almost all. He moves quietly almost by default.
Engineering, Mechanics, and Mathematics; Mostly a holdover from his days as an apprentice during the flexibility portion of his Blue Stripes training, but something he has used recently enough nonetheless, Alan has an education in the design and construction of both civilian and military structures. He can deduce some of the basics about their designs from an external view, recognise the more distinctive types of architecture and techniques used to build them, and most importantly he can analyse and exploit weaknesses therein. He makes for a commendable saboteur.
Lingustics and Languages; The proud result of his informal and unstructured, but rigorous, thorough, and deeply interested education when he was younger - this is a skill that he has always been encouraged to develop. He is naturally fluent in the Common tongue, functionally fluent in the Nilfgaardian language, and at least conversational in the Elder Speech and in Ofiri - even if the topics of those conversations might be a bit odd. Language comes very naturally to Alan, and he enjoys learning new vocabulary immensely - he has begun his education on Dwarvish recently, even though it is oft considered a dead language and thus of very limited use.
Intelligence; Possibly his greatest asset, Alan Enfys is a tremendously bright man. His mind takes to new things like fire to dry kindling - only quicker, and brighter - and he retains information excellently even with limited exposure. He is a superb student who learns quickly and attains well when doing so, being highly introspective and making changes to his behaviour based on the developments around him. This is also where most of his skill with people comes from; although he is a perfectly personable individual, and a well articulated speaker, he relies more on analysis of behaviour and psychology to affect people than on his own charisma - though he remains an adept manipulator and superb liar.
Additional Skills;
Marksmanship; Like all Blue Stripes, he was trained with the bow and the sling as well as with the sword and the axe - but his skill is nothing supernatural, being about average for his background.
Survival; Another generic sort of skill, the usual for someone from his background, but he is a skilled survivalist and can sustain himself reasonably in most non-extreme environments.
Heliotrope; His ace in the hole, a solitary magical sign, taught to him by the lover he still misses and hasn't seen for years.
Riding; The final part of the Blue Stripes training, and a valuable component of the mobility that underlies their success with hit and run tactics. He's good enough to fight competently from horseback, though he's still working on using a bow like that.
Specialty: Alan Enfys fills a multiplicate role, serving well in a fight, functioning serviceably in harsh conditions, and enjoying a surprisingly deep education - though he truly shines in information gathering. If a thing exists to be learned in a city, he can learn it.
Equipment:
Flint and steel
Tinderbox
Coin Purse - 50 Nilfgaardian Florens
Coin Purse - 50 Temerian Orens
A good quality traveler's backpack
A bedroll and a small tent
A bottle of strong alcohol, lacking any particular taste.
A waterskin, full
A deck of Gwent Cards
A sewing kit
About 30m of thin rope
Weapons:
A well made, reliable, three-foot steel arming sword.
A sturdy and utilitarian survival knife, with a serrated reverse side.
Two lapel daggers, one hidden beneath the back of his belt, one hidden in the base of his cloak's hood.
An oak longbow, with a quiver of 30 barbed arrows.
Armor: Alan wears a brigandine over a gambeson, which itself has bands of iron sewn across the backs and ulnar surfaces of the arms for additional protection. He wears whatever helmet he can get his hands on that offers the best protection, knowing the importance of the head in remaining alive, but regularly carries a lighter sallet helm with a coif of chain to protect his neck and shoulders. His lower legs are protected reinforced boots with partial iron sabatons. He's big enough that he can remain mobile with this set up, though obviously not necessarily as agile as someone wearing much lighter armour.
Yessir, will do. I've always pictured the Blue Stripes as excelling because of their teamwork more than anything else, so I highly doubt he's gonna be as badass as I think I've made him sound without the rest of them. You have my word, I won't be writing a Gary Stu, I wrote him with the intention of fulfilling a support role and filling in the gaps.
I think he'll probably divide his attention between setting up camp and taking a part in the watch, I'll get to work on a first post asap.
Medical student living in Scotland, a lover of beer and steak mostly - but also writing, and politics. Because why not make myself [i]even more[/i] divisive.
<div style="white-space:pre-wrap;">Medical student living in Scotland, a lover of beer and steak mostly - but also writing, and politics. Because why not make myself <span class="bb-i">even more</span> divisive. </div>
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