Liliya

The Australos Fight Camp

Heh, good question. What was home these days? Her own place of birth was so long behind her that Aibhilin no longer considered it home, not really. Sure it was what was listed on her entry on the wizards list of active Arena combatants, “Aibhilin. The Lady in Blue. Place of Birth: Bhilinai’s Tear,” but she hadn’t witnessed its decrepit tunnels or spiked cavernous ceilings with her own eyes in near on a decade now. Had it really been so long? Australos hadn’t felt like much of a home in the beginning, it had hardly welcomed her or even her considerable talents with much warmth or openly expressed appreciation. At least in Bhilinai’s Tear she had always been taken by those in her caste as a premier example of their people. Strong, deadly, and with an easy grace and manner toward the sometimes unsavory task of enforcing the will of the strong over the fear of the weak, oppression and submission of the foragers to the whims and appetite of the warriors being the only thing keeping those of her station in the meat and snakeskin necessary to continue in their pursuit of their own goals and ambitions, namely that of upward mobility amongst the caste.

Continued armed opposition to the other tribes who would take their freehold by force was of course the reason they gave to those below them for the brutality with which they treated their foragers, but in reality it mostly came down to being the most desirable, prolific warrior of the lot. The wealthiest, most influential voice you could be, the shot caller. Woman, man, it was all the same there. Through strength and skill at arms coupled with a ferocious reputation and penchant toward violence you would be as guaranteed as you could be to hold position, power and authority. Australos wouldn’t welcome this girl any better than it had welcomed her, Aibhilin herself would not go out of her way to make this place better for the barbarian girl than it had been to her despite the fact that she could in her position as Doctora. It was doubtful any would actively do anything to hurt the girl, violence outside of training was naturally frowned upon and had always been met with swift and immediate repercussion in the form of the camp ritualistically and savagely beating the offending party as a unit. That didn’t mean they would show her any kindness or hold anything back in the mock battles she would be subjected to.

Aibhilin had killed a fighter with four pairs of ears in the arena to his credit to be seen as worthy to become the first woman to join this camp, and those he had fought and bled alongside in Australos were none too happy about his untimely death upon the very sand they stood upon this moment, nor at her having taking his place alongside them in the stable. None of the people at the camp had ever so much as bumped into her in passing during the fleeting moments primarily restricted to eating and personal hygiene that were permitted the otherwise very industrious fighters, and though she had spent two weeks sleeping in the quarters permitted her with one eye open none ever so much as lingered about her door in passing. She had however been beaten, bruised, broken and beleaguered every moment of every combat drill, sparring match and mock arena competition she had participated in for the first year she spent here. None had taken their meals with her, nor had any spoken more than a few snide curses at her expense to her during that time, and she had daily considered returning to Bhilinai’s Tear, or as she had thought of the place at that time, home.

She had joined the camp when she was years older than the girl before her, it had been said at the time and repeatedly thereafter that she had been too old for the training, and though she had spent but a year at the camp it was determined that if she was going to prove herself to the owner of the camp as having been a good investment for the year of food she had consumed at his expense and the Doctore’s time she had taken up throughout the year’s training that she would kill or die upon the sand within the season. It was quite the shock to most of the assembled fighters of the camp when she returned after the bout with a pair of ears on a band of snakeskin tied about her neck. The brutality, the ridicule, the lonesomeness of that first year had pushed her all the more to excel in whatever area she could. They would not converse with her, nor take her seriously, but they would cross mock blades and throw blows at her until both entrants found themselves bloodied, bruised and beaten, and so into this pursuit she had put everything she had within herself with the need of a starving wolf to thrive, to succeed, to emerge victorious and superior.

After her first victory the camp was a different place entirely. Nothing to do with the buildings or scheduling changed, no person had come or gone, but it had never been the same again. All had come to accept her as a competitor. Not to say they had come to see her as an equal, a peer, or even worthy of the cheers and accolades which usually accompany a teammate’s first victory upon the sand. This was perhaps lesser than the respect which came to the others to return to the camp with trophies earned in blood and metal, but it meant much more to her then it did to the average first time victor. To her this was a validation, proof positive that despite the torment and the misery of that first year she had survived and overcome, the first peak of her climb upwards toward a destiny as of yet unknown but ever driving her onward had been surmounted. This girl would learn the same way she had, through pain and isolation, a storm battered island among a sea of uncaring outcroppings and frigid waves, and she would grow and learn or be drowned amongst the treacherous waters. This was the first lesson of the law of blood and sand, to survive despite the pain or be swallowed by it.

It hadn’t been that moment, or even that day when Aibhilin had begun to think of Australos as home. She wasn’t sure if there had even been a moment when her memories of Bhilinai’s Tear had seemed more to her thoughts of a place she had once been then where she was supposed to be, or at least wanted to be. There was a moment when she understood that she couldn’t remember the last time she had longed to be in Bhilinai’s Tear once more, and a time when it didn’t sadden her to think that she would never be there again. She still thought about her siblings, still wondered whatever became of old flings and if that outsiders hound her, rat faced Bhnnocha had would up together with Efynvair, her once crush and later more than crush who she may well have remained in Bhilinai’s Tear with were it not for Bhnnocha’s constant, seemingly innocent but plainly underhanded meddling in the pair’s affairs. In time, though, Australos had increasingly become where she wanted to be, and the fighters had been the people she wanted to be with. Then came Hektor’s death on the sand, and the whole world fell away beneath her feet. Australos had not been home for her anymore, not since that day.

“Good enough. First you eat. Then you learn,” there would be a ceremony to officially induct her as a member of the camp, but that would come later. First there would be food, and lots of it. The fighters trained near on fourteen hours a day and their rations were close to three times that of the average worker or forager, both to increase the fighter’s size and to promote the psychological understanding of their superiority over the common rabble from whom they had largely been born to. Only after the girl had eaten her fill, almost certainly alone as she assumed none from the camp would deign to take their meal with an as of yet not officially inducted member, would Aibhilin pair the girl up with a more experienced student at the camp and instruct them to savagely beat her in mock combat. She would of course be given the chance to defend herself, but at her age and size it was doubtful she could avoid the worst of the attack even if she happened to be a trained combatant. If she still wanted to join after taking her meal alone and without expectation for that to change any time soon, and withstood repeated, vicious blows from sparring blades then she would take the sacramenta and be accepted as a full member of the camp.

Food was already being prepared, the process had begun at the first call of Auxiliaries approaching, and the camp would be expected to feed the soldiers regardless of their feelings on the matter. Legally an Imperial owned business could refuse to feed common Auxiliaries, but it would almost never be done. The cost wasn’t the issue so much as the slight toward the Emperor who employed them, something that would almost never reach the attention of so lofty an individual but which if taken in poor taste could result in the turning of the fortunes of the owner. Naturally she had orders to provide adequate hospitality toward the employees of their esteemed ruler handed down from her own employer, though she was not going to be especially polite about the way she handled them. They served a purpose no doubt, and could just as easily have been her should things have gone a different way. Two of her three brothers had become Auxiliaries during the tail end of the ramp-up, less by choice than by order of the Empire, but it would have been her had they been accepting women. Didn’t mean she was going to host them within the grounds of the Courtyard.

“Devlin, she is our guest and gets the first plate. Our friends here,’ she gestured toward the Auxiliaries, ‘are welcome to their servings after they vacate my courtyard,” Aibhilin gestured toward the fire, erected on the South side of the courtyard near the front entrance to the cavern next to which a series of old world ceramic bowls, most chipped and cracked but all in reasonable working order sat upon a serving table. These in turn were being filled by the presumed students tasked with the duty with flame cooked snake meat, fungi collected from around the mountain stream the camp depended on for its survival, and small cuts of meat which were mammalian in origin, probably rat or even thinly sliced cave lion. Aibhilin made no effort save the gesture to instruct the girl toward the fire, but walked in that direction herself assuming the girl would follow. “What is your name?” she looked toward the fire and the promise of hot food which it offered as she spoke the words rather than ensuring the girl was following her, but assumed she would hear a response, even if it were delayed by a matter of seconds should she choose to engage the Auxiliaries in conversation before her.

Aibhilin herself would have spat in their faces should she have been in the girl’s position, and wouldn’t care the slightest bit if she did so. They had almost certainly taken everything and everyone the girl had ever known from her, dropping her off in a strange place filled with stranger people without the explanation of why or even the shared vocabulary necessary to explain where they were taking her and to what purpose. Devlin had earlier snorted audibly at the reproach from the youth in response to his comment, had even chuckled a bit under his breath, but he hadn’t made any further comment. Not while the boss lady and the Auxilaries were speaking business. With that over his mouth quickly turned back on, picking up where he had left off. “Well Ouis’Visean, our time here is through. Wish I could say I was gonna miss having you around, but I doubt you’re fit to clean the latrine around here, so let the emperor have you,” Devlin propelled his arms forward in a shooing motion clearly instructing the Auxilaries out through the gate the way that had come, though there was certainly time to interrupt or say something to them on the part of the girl who had been taken here by them.

The Thing That Should Not Be - Aibhilin vs Zande

“A silent fury who no torment could tame,”

Basic Information
Name: Aibhilin of Bhilinai’s Tear (Ah-ve-linn; Ve-linn-ah’s).
Alias: The Lady in Blue.
Title: Doctora of the Australos Fight Camp.
Sex: Female.
Age: Thirty.
Class: Post-Apocalyptic Pit Fighter/Gladiatorial Drill Sergeant.
Alignment: Lawful Evil.

Brief Description
Height: Five Foot Ten.
Weight: One Hundred Fifty Four Pounds.
Measurements: 34-24-34.
Build: Athletic, Muscled.
Skin Tone: Fair, Pale.
Eye Color: Steely Blue.
Hair Color: Rich Auburn.

Narrative Description
Aibhilin escaped the worst of the ravages the Wastes inflict upon those who call them home, though as compared to a person from the old world she would still be visibly too pale from a combination of naturally fair skin and the absence of the sun from the new world. This is not quite the reticulant green-grey pallor of the less well-nourished wastelanders, however, and in her time and place she is possessed of a skin tone which would be viewed as quite healthy as compared to the average considering the circumstances. Most visibly obvious of course is her prodigious height and size as compared to the starving masses of the world post Sky is Over. Standing at five foot ten and weighing one hundred fifty four pounds of toned muscle and potential energy she is more cave lion than human, something out of place and out of time in this place of death and desiccation in the lonesome sand, and even in the old world she would have been like someone out of a fitness infomercial than a regular human being, full figured and fit to a degree most humans never reach even with the advantages of a healthy diet and proper training regimen.

She would have been beautiful were it not for the way she has lived her life and the traumas she has almost entirely willingly subjected herself to, and even underneath it all she still strikes quite the figure. Powerful, with a musculature that lends itself to a professional athlete more than a model, perhaps stronger in jaw than would be found to be conventionally attractive but otherwise gleaming eyed and aesthetically appealing, though a veneer of scars and poorly attended to wounds and breaks is the most immediately noticeable aspect of her outward appearance. Cosmetically she would be more likely to be found in the paints and dyes of clay and blue-blooded reptiles than the charcoals and chemical pigments favored by ladies of the Empire lending heavily to the fight name given her by the overly appearance concerned fight promoters of the Crimson Throne, and when in battle a mask of blue dyed clay and paint covering her jaw, mouth and cheeks is almost guaranteed to be all the accouterments she allows herself save her battle garb, itself left largely unadorned or made up beyond that which is mechanically necessary for its function, and if she has ever worn decorative jewelry none would attest to it.

Personality
Aibhilin was raised to savage purpose, and in this she excelled where most fell short. It came naturally and easily to her to understand that life was primarily a quest for meat. Those strong enough to take it from the weak did so and thrived further at their expense, and those who were weak attempted to catch so many snakes and rats as they could in the ever dark below the surface of the planet to feed themselves without being seen or noticed by those stronger than themselves. She spent the majority of her life excelling at this practice, and only as the years went on and she grew stronger did she begin to understand the thrill of the fight. This was far different than the experience of the hunt, a true competitor who could give her a run for her leather and bronze, and she loved the experience. It would never again be satisfying to live as a casual hunter of the weak, not anymore, and so she trained. She fought. She chose to make the sacrifices, the payment in flesh and bone that it required to feel the satisfaction of a true opponent left bleeding and broken at her heel, to see the light fade from their eyes inches from her own gleaming orbs.

More cave-lion than human the Bhilinai are said to be, and though they are without question human their culture lends much to the story. They have a complicated and often obfuscated religion which demands the hunt, and more specifically demands the hunt of the lesser and the promotion of the stronger. You don’t get ahead where they’re from by being pretty, by being good with numbers or by being an excellent tailor or smith. They excel only by force of will and skill at arms, the inheritance from parent to heirs going only to the one who has proven themselves the most prolific hunter of humanity, and the spiritual protections of the elders from the outsiders they say lurk just beyond the veil and occasionally come out seeking to bring death to the living are not given to the meek but to the strong. She has adapted this philosophy first from its roots as a hunter of the week to a combatant facing the strong and on into her current life as a Doctora, she who molds the clay of inexperienced aspirants seeking championship into the death dealing potential energy of the warrior. Hard, stern, detached from her pupils, but dedicated to their success with the fervent passion shared by all those who wish to see their own glory days relived through the bloodletting of the new champions.

Narrative Description of Equipment
Though Aibhilin has acquired a significant amount of arms and armor over her several years of professional fighting and paid training of potential new champions of the arenas of the Wastes, her most prolific and common garb will be described here for convenience.

Though her people are known for several aesthetic choices in arms and armor only three of these traditions have stayed with Aibhilin into the modern day. First and foremost the use of a snakeskin leather jerkin which leaves the shoulders, neck and clavicles exposed and is fastened in the front by snakeskin laces, in her case being plated in horizontal steel lamellar plates over which a separate pixane of thick snakeskin plated in bronze and faced in ratskin with the hair left on is worn. Second, the inclusion of a hollow ring parallel to the guard of her sidearm on its pommel, whose significance to the religious beliefs of the Bhilinai is ambiguous but considered by them to be very important, in this case forged of steel and placed on an arming sword of similar construct. Third, the wearing of a riding skirt, usually constructed of snakeskin patches faced with ratskin with the hair left on though in her case worn in a manner similar to cuises at the hips and thighs, and layered with bronze plates in that fashion while left otherwise unchanged. This is in her case worn over regular chauses plated in bronze lamellar scales in the Imperial fashion.

At the arms she is generally not wearing any armor, or even thick cloth or leather, choosing to favor an easier time at handling polearms in the ring, though she does own armor which could be used for this purpose. It is important to note that the leather and cloth worn as an armor platform for the arms is considerably more thick than a simple leather jacket, more comparable to wearing four at once, and that several late 15th century halberdiers and doppelsoldners in brigandine, as well as Conquistadors and the Swiss in Munition Armor made the same choice. Her polearm of choice is a bronze hafted halberd wrapped in leather at several points to be more easily handled, with a steel axe-type head opposite a steel spike and topped with a spear point around eight feet long from butt end to spike tip, and besides her arming sword she carries a bronze dagger in the seax subtype and a punch dagger on her right hip. She wears snakeskin boots and has a coat of bronze scales floating from her shin to their arming points across the sides of the heel of her boots for added protection, meager as it is when compared to plated sabbatons, for strikes at her feet from above.

Narrative Description of Combat Abilities
Though hardly a super human, and less capable now with collected age and injury than she was several years ago Aibhilin is still one of the most dangerous women alive in the Wastes as of 100SIO. A prolific duelist with a history of sixteen confirmed kills in the arenas of the Empire of the Crimson Throne and a well-documented training regimen that would kill lesser beings, to challenge her without forethought would be unlikely to go in your favor. The sheer value of her armament collected piece by piece from those laid low by her blade and the number of scars and missing bits and pieces across her body tells a story of someone who has taken, lost, been knocked down and gotten back up to put the offending party in their graves more times than she has remaining fingers. More hard knock than properly educated fencer, she learned to parry a low horizontal slash that suddenly cut high and diagonal across her breast with a flick of the wrist and a pivot of a foot from an opposing duelist by having been taken advantage of with just that strike, costing her a pinky, most of a ring finger and a very visible scar from her xiphoid to her right shoulder.

She learned to sprawl from an opponent who used the same tactic against her and landed a blow with a dagger to her back that left her coughing up blood for three months and near dead for the first two weeks of that time, having only learned to take an opponent’s legs in a grapple by having been taken down in just that way in response to a high horizontal slash of her own having been countered as such from an earlier opponent, that experience costing her a vicious beating at the hands of an opponent who managed to pin her arms with his knees while raining death down onto her from above with his fists. Had she not put a punch dagger worn at her hip into the back of his groin in the process she would have died that day, the same punch dagger which had once buried itself into her left shoulder, having been aimed for her heart and narrowly avoided by quick footwork and quicker thinking by an opponent whose left arm and back she had taken in a knife fight without having given enough thought to what might be on her right hip or how fast she might be able to pull down and away with her left, pivoting with her right hip while bending towards her with her right knee and launching a blow at near zero distance.

Backstory
The Wastes are not kind to most who inhabit it’s alien landscapes of harsh desert sands, unforgiving expanses of barren rocky peaks and eternally ashen sky. Above ground there isn’t a drop of liquid water to be found in a thousand square miles, and below the surface of their dead world nothing subsists save the rats, the snakes, the crawling things of the world that once was, along with those desperate few who have managed to meek out a living amongst the dying world’s forgotten places. Bhilinai’s Tear is no exception to the rule of the new world, and Sky is Over crippled her once thriving society just as it sent the rest of the world descending into a cacophony of madness, constant near starvation and crippling depression brought on from the new life spent underground, in the darkness. The culture survived, and like the others who did so adapted. Their new normal became more primal, increasingly savage and bloodthirsty as the years passed and no salvation arose to greet them from the ever expanding sands. No doubt it would be the end of life as a whole, but not before breeding a new kind of savagery into those poor beings still clinging to life among the world-wide necropolis.

Aibhilin was born into this underworld of death and starvation, and in it thrived. None do this entirely of their own power to be sure, this is not the kind of world that one emerges into at birth and becomes instantly successful. She was born of prolific hunters of humanity, and from this beginning grew strong while those around her grew weak. Where the others starved and fought for scraps of snake and rat she learned early on that the more efficient way to eat is to take by force those choice catches, for whatever that term is worth in this dead world, that she could from those around her too weak to keep her from her taking from them. It’s what her parents did, what their parents did, and to all outward appearances this is how it had always been here. The elders spoke of a time when this was not the case, in the before time, when the world was green and the sky blue. She didn’t much care. This old world wasn’t hers, had never been, her’s was a legacy of death and meat, and into this she devoted the majority of her years on the dying planet.

As she grew she inherited an increasing responsibility to fend for herself, and watched as her parents and siblings grew older and died or became stronger, all the while training, fighting, becoming what she was destined to be. She was a warrior, and a good one. It wasn’t long before she had grown into her full height and size, several inches taller than the average in this world of malnourished and starving scavengers that deigned to call themselves humanity, and possessed of far greater size and physical strength than any woman, and most men, in her Freehold. Humans do not grow especially large when deprived of a healthy and consistent diet, nor do they stave off sickness, defect of body nor deficit in mental faculty when fighting day by day to get the handful of morsels necessary to simply be able to get up and do it all over again in the morning. She belonged to the caste of takers of life, hunters of meat, and since the rise of humanity from the primordial forest never had the stark contrast between the powerful and the weak been more visibly apparent. She and her kind were as Gods in comparison to these reticulant, dessicated non-entities, and if they went hungry so that she might eat twice her share it was of no concern to her.

It was at this time that she knew she would go on to be more even than an honored warrior of the Bhilinai. There was much bronze and leather to be had by testing one’s mettle in the forge of the Arenas of the Empire of the Crimson Throne, and though they were less inclined to favor her as a warrior woman, for their’s was a fickle culture focused on superficial notions unrelated to ones valor as a taker of life, it was all the same to them in the end. The show was all that mattered once the blood started flowing. She traveled further across the Wastes than any in her tribe had ever gone so far as she was aware and threw herself into the fray as soon as she was able to get a camp to take her seriously, accomplished by running a blade through one of their premier pit fighters after an extended bout that cost her two fingers on her left hand and a long scar across her right clavicle. She excelled at this, too, reveled in the competition of meeting a fellow warrior across the sand and delivering them to their final end to the roar of the crowd.

She had taken sixteen pairs of ears in the ring and received a commission from an Imperial owned fighting camp to operate as one of the very few Doctoras in the Empire by the time she was ready to retire. The wounds accrued in her bouts had taken their toll by the time she was twenty six, the lifespan of professional killers in the arena being one of the shortest of all professions, and she would be remembered as the Lady in Blue by the Arena viewing public for an age. Her’s was a mask of clay died in the off color blue blood of under dweller reptilians, and a mantle of steel plates scarlet not from rust but from intentionally poorly polished human blood, no longer would she need to prove herself to anyone, and the second phase of her life began. As her parents had done for her and her siblings all those years ago she now shaped the new generation of killers, blood-letters, pit fighters and fortune seekers who risked the blood and sand for a chance at greatness and a coat of plated bronze and steel, and in this task her next chance at greatness presented itself. To train a champion was to live vicariously as a champion once more through her pupil.

The Thing That Should Not Be - Aibhilin vs Zande

@Doc Doctor

The Thing That Should Not Be - Aibhilin vs Zande

Crimson Throne Arena - 100 yard diameter circular fighting ground. Sixty years of death has resulted in the arena being littered with thousands of cracked teeth and bone chips, easily identifiable to one who'd examine a handful of the blood tinted sand.

Battle Theme:

The Thing That Should Not Be - Aibhilin vs Zande

“I have heard it said that the beast is an outsider! A real live demon, like the superstitious rabble discuss in the street during the Dying Season!’ ‘No, no, it is not so. Certainly not an outsider, the cursed things are plainly imaginary! The beast is just some misfortunate barbarian gone mad from years of isolation,’ ‘Well I’ve heard it said that it tore through fifteen Auxiliary before they finally caged the monster. I do not exaggerate, they put it in a real cage. The very same as the kind they use for kenneling cave lions! Solid steel bars, the things cost more than you or me are worth combined! The beast chewed through the bonds it was first placed in and caught another six of their troop by surprise! And I mean what I say, it chewed through leather and bronze restraints with its teeth! Half the platoon were sent to their graves, much of them in never making it on account of being caught up in the monster’s gullet!’ ‘Is Kull not available? I simply cannot fathom the reason they are sending some woman out to fight a monster like that. What poor spectacle, and in even worse taste,’

‘This Some Woman of whom you speak is the Lady in Blue. With mine own two eyes I chance happened to witness her bring death to Astara’s Dawn on the killing field of Arles’Ton. Rare and rarer still a dance the caliber of their performance, and to think it was held outside of the capital on the pretext of her being a woman and poor sport. Astara’s Dawn had her pinned to the sand with his knees upon her shoulders after several minutes of bloody spectacle and display of skill with blade and polearm, and hadn’t yet had firm grasp of victory enough to chance to peer toward the dais for the signal before she in a stroke of wit and beauty at arms managed to put a dagger through his, erhm… Well, through his groin. This all being while she was held upon the sand to be sure, the spectators were certain that the fight would be finished within moments, and no doubt would see her the loser likely to lose her head upon the sands. None had realized the stroke until it was too late for Astara’s Dawn. Pressing her advantage she slipped from his mount and beat him to death with naught but her own two hands,’

‘That was five years ago. She’s all but certain to have aged to white hair by now, this entire spectacle is farce. It would have been best for her to send one of her students to accept the Emperor’s summons, poor form indeed to watch an old woman with a crutch face the most terrible monster to ever blaspheme with its presence the Arena of his Imperial Majesty,’ ‘Were I you I would not have it become known in polite company that you named an outsider in a box a more fearsome contestant than Kull. He may be otherwise preoccupied for the duration of this monster’s tenure upon the sands, but I don’t doubt a challenge proffered your way the moment he returns to form should he overhear those words. If your feelings towards the matter of the Lady in Blue have not changed however, I would be deligheted to direct you to the stables of the Master at Arms. I am absolutely assured that he would accept your petition to proffer thine own blade upon the sand. What say you, five shards to one in favor of the monster? I myself will venture a thousand upon the laurels of the Lady,’ ‘I will see that venture, and raise you five thousand shards upon the beast in the cage,”

Not in living memory had something so demonstrably detestable entered the arena of the Empire of the Crimson Throne to encourage the Emperor to send a demand to the operating fight camps to send their most decorated combatants to once more do battle in His name. The entirety of the camp had assumed it was a joke until the Emperor’s Legion delivered the message personally. She’d never fought in the capital, never intended on doing as such either. She had long since written this off as something the Empire and her misguided notions toward appearance and sex would deny her regardless of her laurels. Sixteen pairs of ears had been her trophies from blood spilt upon the sand in the name of the Emperor she had never seen. She would see him today, on his towering dais some thirty feet above the viewing stands. None but the fanciest of Imperials complete with their gaudy, wealth strewn figures would be in attendance for this event. The ten thousand wealthiest, most powerful people in the world were here to watch her die. It wasn’t the first time she had been expected to die for the amusement of those above her station. She had no plans towards allowing this to be the day she gave them what they were after.

No, today would end with her on her way back toward Australos. She had students she needed to return to, future champions to place in the staging ground she currently occupied. None at Australos had half the victories she had, and so the law demanded she attend to this beast at the command of her Emperor despite her having retired and accepted a paid position as Doctora of the camp. She had stuck to the law of blood and sand this far in her adult life, and though she had considered simply declining the invitation and sending another in her stead, an act the crowd and emperor would have preferred, she had known from the moment the Emperor’s Legion arrived that it would be her standing here this day. It wasn’t lost on her that she was standing where Hektor’s killer had stood before losing his life to an ally’s blade in the back. It was a good omen. This was the place where an enemy had met his untimely end all those years ago. Today would be the day that this foreign monster was freed from the shackles of its bondage at the hands of the Crimson Throne, and she would see it to as good a death as any a monster can expect to receive upon the sand. The gate was opening, and with a last glance at the bloodstain she had decided had belonged to Hektor’s killer she strode forth into the arena.

The Australos Fight Camp

@Silver Carrot Sorry about the delay, got caught up in an irl thing for a bit. It's up now.

The Australos Fight Camp

“I think she’s trying to figure out if you’re a man with tits, or a she bear,” Devlin proffered to no one in particular at the sight of the girl eying the camp, its occupants, and especially the Doctora after the gate had been wedged open and the troop had entered the main courtyard, captive in tow. Devlin himself was smaller than Aibhilin, and was every bit the barbarian born he had been taken as by the Auxiliary. From the Whit’Mar freehold all the way across the Wastes and North of the accepted border established during the First Crusade, he had only wound up here through a series of poor decisions made as a young fortune seeker intending on returning to his warband a hero, slaves and wealth trailing in his wake. Instead he had taken a bolt to the right shoulder in his first engagement and wound up a slave in the fighting pits of the Southeast, before being offered up to the Empire to take the place of his owner’s son in the mandatory tribal Auxiliary drives of the late seventies. None of that would matter to this girl, though. If she was an Imperial subject she wasn’t from anywhere Aibhilin had ever heard of.

Once she had gotten through the gate and set her eyes upon the Doctora it was immediately apparent just how tan she really was. Not necessarily particularly dark skinned by birth, but tan. An oddity to be sure, someone the imperials would have wanted as a house slave more than a brutish pit fighter. Must have been from a nomadic tribe, born above ground in a place that wasn’t as prone to the erratic weather she would be sure to get her fill of here. She had gotten lucky to have been taken by the group she had been for what it was worth, considering she no doubt only survived because of her youth and had almost certainly lost those closest to her in the engagement. It wasn’t legal for the Auxiliary to take personal slaves as such, let alone to sell them for personal gain. They were in the employ of the Empire and couldn’t profit from their duty until leaving the service, but that didn’t mean the occasional especially high value person didn’t fall through the cracks and wind up being exchanged for bronze shards behind closed doors. The troop were either too foolish to note her worth to the right buyer, or were more committed to the cause then the average by far.

None of that mattered now, not anymore. She’d been presented to a school, and from here the involvement of the Auxiliary as an official Imperial body would come to an end one way or the other. This barbarian girl was now a subject of the empire, and would either take the sacramenta and join the camp for which her employer would pay the Empire a finder’s fee, or she would be given a day’s provisions and pointed towards the nearest settlement, the one which provided Australos with its own provisions and food stuffs, to live out her life as a subsistence level forager. There was no way to keep her from simply returning back to where she had been taken by the troop in the first place of course, and no one would blink or try to stop her if she waited until the Auxiliary moved off and took the same route she’d been taken on to reach Australos back home. Knowing how the Auxiliary operate however, the chances that anything was left for her to go back home to were slim to none. In her experience most who went back turned around a day or two after getting home and realizing there was nothing left for them there volunteered at the camp.

Chances were she had probably never seen so many people in one place in her life as she was about to see flooding into the courtyard. Australos wasn’t a large outfit, only twenty to thirty fighters at any given time and a handful of paid staffers, but they were far larger than any group who could manage to survive jumping from hand-dug well to tiny natural spring out in the desert. The larger cities could only exist because of a direct access to a natural aquifer, and even most of them gravitated at around six hundred people in total. Everyone was aware of the arrival at this point, and they’d all made their way to the courtyard to get a look at the new recruit for themselves. Most were not enthused. Too small, female, barbarian, whatever their individual complaint was it was plainly visible that she wasn’t going to be quick in making friends of her potential fellow fighters. She shouldn’t take it personally. Fight camps were tight knit units, and most would rather a small group who’d known one another for years then outsiders of unknown skill and intent joining the stable, but they didn’t say anything out loud. They knew what came next, and would hold their tongue until it was passed.

Aibhilin neither smiled nor glowered toward the youth as she sized her up. She didn’t much like looking at people like they were meat, had too much experience on the other end of the ordeal to appreciate being the one preforming the visual dance of half passionless stare down half cold hard napkin arithmetic. It was costly to train a fighter, and every one they took who didn’t come out of their first engagement alive was a significant monetary loss to the camp. Aibhilin looked the girl in the eyes only after carefully examining her every other feature in a process that left her feeling like she needed to bathe. She had curiosity in those eyes of her’s, and the glimmer of intelligence. Aibhilin herself was not known for her intellect, nor her appreciation of those who thought they could think their way around an axe to the head, but it was enough to come to her decision. “This is a camp. We fight other camps for food, hides, metal,” she tapped at the long blade hanging from her sword belt to emphasize the possibly foreign term, “we protect our own. You can stay here and be a camp fighter like us, or go home. Your choice,” the Auxililary wouldn’t appreciate the, “or go home,” bit, but outsiders hound them. The choice would be this girl’s regardless of the troop’s opinion on the matter.

The Australos Fight Camp

Spoiler: I wrote that post while half asleep. It's almost certainly my bad, but I'm getting the reply up now.

The Australos Fight Camp

Devlin is just some guy working for the camp as private security. He's watching the road leading up to the camp, and notices some soldiers approaching so he alerts the boss, who in surprise accidentally ruins the painting she was working on. When the troops show up one of them makes an offhanded comment towards Devlin to which he insults the offending party, before the boss asks the troopers what they're doing here. I wanted to give you a chance to explore Rags feelings on all of this as she's being hauled off towards the camp and if you wanted fill in her views on the troops escorting her, who may or may not be the same as captured her and killed her people in the first place, before just assuming that she (Rags) is just in the camp as a student. If you want you could just skip to that point with your post, of course.

The Australos Fight Camp

“Auxiliary approaching!” a turn of the head over a deeply scarred shoulder, a tussle of curls and locks and a sharp, involuntary movement of the wrist was all it had taken. From perfection of form and purpose to waste and ashes, and all in a moment fleeting as to have never been, save for the fact plainly visible on the flesh before her that it had been, that the damage had been done and that a tiny piece would be forever marred on otherwise flawless creation. “Outsiders hound you, Devlin,” the woman thus afflicted called back towards the courtyard wall and the man standing at attention on the rusted gate of iron bars unceremoniously thrown to the elements for the past near on two hundred years. He shuddered at the reply and, casting a glance over his own shoulder came to understand the nature of his transgression, quickly turning his gaze back to the path leading to their mountainside home of brick and natural stone, quietly counting the number of individuals taking the trail and carefully considering their colors, accoutrement and outfit. She didn’t have to look to know what he was doing. In the Dying Season even a fight camp wasn’t immune to bandits in the guise of Imperial troops.

“Curse you, Devlin,” she grumbled under her breath as she surveyed the damage wrought by her miscalculation at the sudden call from the roadside tower some ten feet behind and to her left. The face had been perfect, had taken weeks to bring forth upon the brick with her homemade pigments of animal fats boiled down to a liquid and mixed with the sharp pigments in alizarin and ochre which could be formed from the naturally occurring resources around the camp. Where there had been a half formed eye, symmetrical to the other with a precision her usual efforts did not permit her, there was now a deep gouge across the bridge of the nose and upwards, scarring the brow and discoloring the previously blue-black hair. She bent at the knee and withdrew a rag from her small table of yellow and violet plastic, some toy an old world child would have sat at and drank from plastic tea cups filled with dreams and imagination back when the sun shone and the world was well fed, fat and green with the bounty of Astara’s blessings loaded upon them in droves none to include the Bull Emperor of the Crimson Throne could afford in the modern day, in this new world.

She stood and wiped at the gouge of pigment and binder, but it was plainly clear that she wouldn’t be fixing it this way. Nothing was ever that simple. She would have to wait for the paint to dry, and cut away at it or cover it with another layer before carrying on with the rest of the project. He had been beautiful, Hectyr. Square jawed, strong featured, with those mischievous eyes promising death, deliverance, neither, both. It was a shame, had he kept those eyes on his opponent’s he might have caught the feint in time to avoid losing his to the other man’s punchblade. They had run the drill a hundred times, eyes on the target, don’t forget the off hand just because the main is thrusting at you. Must’ve thought he was real clever stepping off the line and to the outside of his opponent’s guard, holding him with his own off hand at the elbow while sending a diagonal downward strike to the back of the guy’s right knee with his own main hand. Takes less time to draw a blade at the hip, pivot and deliver a straight blow then it does to bring a blade from your own shoulder to your opponent’s knee.

He had been one of the last to go through the camp’s training regimen at the same time as she had, was going to retire soon. She’d already offered him a commission as an officer of the camp, and he’d been leaning increasingly in that direction rather than his first thought toward buying up mercenary contracts and forming his own unit. What would that fool have done with a mercenary company? Go back to fighting for thirty bronze scales a head per engagement? He’d been offered a thousand bronze scales as a signing bonus for that last fight. It was sitting in an old world plastic container once meant for porting food back and forth in his room, alongside his gear and everything else he had ever owned. He’d never even used the money. She’d heard the man who killed him had subsequently been stabbed in the back by a foreign barbarian woman facing Kull. She kept to the law of the arena very strictly, if she had a religion, a faith, it was in the infallibility of blood and sand. Still it pained her to have lost the Black Rabbit of Astara to a lucky punch and a foolish miscalculation. Still it brought a smile that his killer had been stabbed in the back by his own teammate.

Neither of these things were in keeping with the law of blood and sand, but she could accept this sinful trespass of her nature against the arena. “Hold!” Devlin again, they must have advanced quite a ways. Could she have been lost in her own thoughts long enough to have missed their trek up the mountainside? Sure enough she was still standing pigments and rag in hand, and sure enough she could see faces poking out from behind the bars when she turned to look. Placing her stuff down on the plastic table before casting a last look at Hektor’s marred visage peering back at her from the brick of the inner courtyard wall she approached the gate as Devlin spoke to the Auxiliary. “You calling me a barbarian, Ouis’Visean!? How’d you even get into the Auxiliary? Someone buy you for snake handling and decide you were too big to be worth feeding, sell you to the emperor?’ ‘Shut up Devlin. I am the Doctora of the Australos Fight Camp. State your business, sergeant,” she could see a scrawny thing, dark and of healthy color draped in an ill-fitting hide between the assembled unit. It was a girl, of a good age for training, if smaller than she’d like. For her own sake Aibhilin hoped the girl had come to the Auxiliary dressed like that rather than been made to dress this way by the troop. She didn’t need a broken girl to mend back to a new normal. This was Australos, the only need here was for fit killers of men.