Penny

Heroes of The Guard: A Warhammer 40K RP

Sel peered at the handcuffed troopers with a leery look. They glared at her but with no more venom than they had for Kayden and Morek. Had Commissar Sobek really been delaying her or was it simple chance? It seemed unlikely that a man as fanatical as the Commissar appeared would be involved in such a thing. Maybe he was just predictable enough that these troops had taken advantage.

"Uh yes sir," Sel agreed, falling in beside Kayden. Neither of them mentioned the Langeroth's as they walked the few hundred yards to the training bay. The cavernous cargo hold had been converted into an assault course in which shipping crates formed walls, rope climbs, and other obstacles over which the troops of second platoon were currently scrambling in full battle gear. It had clearly been going on for some time and the troops were haggard and exhausted. When they reached the end of the course, they unslung their las guns and fired across the bay at improvised targets made from discarded rubber tires. The troops had five rounds to score a hit, no easy feet with hands shaking and lungs heaving from the course. After they managed a hit, visible by a puff of black smoke, they slung their rifles and jogged back to the start of the course, a shipping container filled with cold water to improvised a bear pit.

Sergeant Crispin stood beside the container, screaming abuse and encouraging the troops with blows and curses. He grabbed a particularly laggardly soldier, one of the half dozen replacements they had been assigned, and physically pitched him into the water with copious and unflattering commentary on the unfortunate troopers parentage. As a replacement for Mattalow, Crispin was a definite improvement but he swung a little too far in the other direction. He was a disciplinarian, almost a martinette, always willing to pile on the punishment detail for the smallest infractions. Crispin seemed to view Sel as an irritation which had to be endured, which was close enough to how she felt about him as made no difference.

"Move you sorry bastards! I want you to cut ten seconds or we will be running this for the rest of the cycle!" he screamed, slapping another trooper over the head as he staggered past. Sel resisted the urge to reach for a lho stick deciding that on balance she would rather stay in to good graces of the common soldier. Crispin might win the respect of the troops before they got into action, but if he kept coming down on every infraction with the proverbial wrath of Macharius Sel was going to make a point of not standing near him when the bullets started flying.

"These Langeroth pricks are going to be a problem," Sel confided, leaning on a bollard as she watched the platoon run the assault course.

Gold & Glory: AU thread

Emmaline ran back towards the ship waving her arms and screaming. The sound of combat echoed around. Swords crunched into flesh, men screamed and ghouls howled. The cacophony spread, monkeys chittered and flights of brightly colored birds burst from the trees to the relative safety of the sky. By the time she reached the ship the men hauling it were beginning to slack on the cables. Unfortunately the men on the starboard watch, closer to the action, were doing so faster than there companions to port. The result was that the ship was already beginning to turn on her greased runners, and within a few seconds was likely to capsize.

“Keep pulling!” she screamed, grabbing the nearest crew member and shoving him back towards a rope he had just abandoned. The crewman snarled and lifted a fist to strike at her, then saw who it was and thought better of it

“What is happening?” he demanded, his hand on his cutlass and his eyes towards the sounds of the fighting.

“The ship is going to fall over if you dont…” there was a sudden grinding sound. Emmaline eeped and bolted back towards Markus as the ship began to tip over on its wooden rollers. It seemed slow at first, but accelerated as men screamed and ran from the ropes. A great shadow came down over Emmaline and she felt a pang of despair as she realised she wasn't going to make it. Uselessly she covered her head as thousands of pounds of wood smashed down atop her with a sound like the world ending.

Death took longer than Emmaline imagined. So long in fact that she opened one eye to see what was keeping it. To her surprise she was very much still alive. Against all odds the falling ship had come down in just such a way that one of the open gun ports had passed her through the hull. Timber all around her groaned and she shuddered to think of what had happened to the rigging, not to mention the members of the crew who hadn’t run fast enough. She was very lucky that all the guns and stores had already been unloaded or she would have been smashed to paste regardless. There was enough light that she could clamber along to the waist of the ship. The gratings were gone and she could see along the length of the mainmast now laying horizontal on the ground. All around her were the cries of wounded and dying men, some partially crushed, other torn by flying ropes or showers of splinters. And if all that wasn’t bad enough there were still ghouls out there.

“Great.” Emmaline sighed.

De Trop Disgrace: Warhammer Fantasy RP

"Julian! Julian you lét me oot of haire right now!" Emmaline shouted, pounding on the door with balled fists. Her skin crawled from where the corpse of Colditz had gripped her as he dragged her back to her rooms and locked her in. Judging from the dull return of her blows, the corpse was leaning against the door on the outside. She spread her arms behind her and screamed wordlessly, stamping her foot with frustration. The door remained unmoved. Emmaline stomped over to the window an threw up the sash. Iron bars had been set in the wall to cover the window and prevent escape. Beyond the bars evening was falling and tendrils of mist were coiling up out of the valley, giving the impression of a vast leviathan pulling itself free of the earth. The impression was deepend by the greenish glow of the rising moon which seemed to turn the mist luminous and sinister. Shapes seemed to move in the fog, to Emmaline's eye they were shambolic and threatening though she never made one out clearly. She made a mental note to retire the phrase: at least it can't get any worse.

"Well I suppose being eaten by beastmen isn't the worst thing," Emmaline muttered, considering the dozens of miles of wilderness between the valley and civilization. She gripped the bars for a moment, feeling the cold iron beneath her palms. No time like the present. Emmaline hurried over to her dresser and took a nail file and a bottle of brandy. She pulled the cork with her teeth and spat it away, taking a long swallow. That was doubtless a sin against good liquor but her nerves needed steadying. Etching the runes she needed into the iron bars was a frustrting task. Not for the first time Emmaline promised Ranald that if she survived she was going to pay more attention to her studies. When she was finally satisfied with the runes she splashed some brandy over the bars and took a step back.

"Eleanor?" Emmaline nearly jumped out of her skin as the door creaked open. She spun about, cursed at not shutting the window and endeavored to cover it as best she could with her stance. Julian stepped through the door with an appologetic look on his face. He looked awful. His usual lean face was haggard with unhealthy dark circles under his eyes, a slight tick tugged at his left eye every few seconds and his hands trembled.

"I'm sorry about all this," he said earnestly, as though he had ruined a ball rather than used black sorcery to kill an entire estate worth of people and animate thier corpses to do his bidding.

"Pléase you 'ave to let me go," Eleanor begged, she would have dropped to her knees and begged, if that wouldn't reveal what she had been doing at the window. Julian's eyes flicked to the bottle of brandy in her hand and, absurdly, Emmaline felt a little embarassed.

"You aren't planning to hit me with that are you?" Julian asked, his eyes cutting back towards the statue still corpse of Colditz. Emmaline hadn't considered it but suddenly wished she had. Instead she took another long slug and held the bottle out towards Julian. The necromancer shook his head.

"I need to stay clear headed," he said, maddeningly calm about the whole situation. He seemed to be determined to act as though this were no different from any of their other conversations, as though he hadn't revealed himself to be a monster.

"It all started at university," Julian explained, unasked. He flopped down onto a couch and patted the space beside him. Emmaline considered her options and stepped towards Julian, taking another theatrical swig to draw his attention away from the window. Brandy burned in her belly and she felt her cheeks flushing. She wanted to scream at him that she didn't care but she was too practised a con artist to give in to that emotion.

"Eet dosen't mattair ai know you are a good man et zat you would nevair 'urt me please let me go," she beeseched, taking his hand in her own. It might have been imagination but there seemed to be a slimy texture to the boy's flesh that hadn't been there before. He gripped her tightly, obviously pleased at the contact.

"At first it was just history," he confided, "I became fascinated with the Sylvanian wars." Emmaline knew only the vaugest legends of those invasions, mostly from sermons she had been forced to listen to when she was a girl. Priests liked telling stories about those dark times, each one seeming to think that the time of the Three Emperors was a fertile and original field for parables.

"But the university had all kinds of materials, some of them had... passages in them. I knew they were proscribed but I just wanted to learn," Julian explained. Emmaline had heard of such texts, books where spells lurked in code, in foot notes, even masqureading as childrens nursery rhymes. An educated man with talent and money might easily piece them together but to try such spells, incomplete and corrupt was as close to insanity as Emmaline could imagine.

"Sigmar save me how am I going to explain all this," Julian wailed, putting his head in hands.

"Well you could tell evairyoné zat a plagué came through and wé waire ze on-lee survivairs," Emmaline suggested, unable to turn off her devious mind even now. Julian looked up at her considering it, his eyes widened with sudden hope as he turned over the idea.

"That... that is a really good idea," Julian admitted. "But...I could never trust you not to reveal what I have done. Emmaline shrugged her shoulders.

"But I will be away in Brettonia, and who would believe a simple woman?" Emmaline suggested. Julian nodded eagerly and seemed ready to spring to his feet, just as suddenly his eyes narrowed.

"What happened to your accent madmo..." The brandy bottle crashed into Julian's head with a shattering impact that flung shards of glass and drops of brandy in all directions. The necromancer slumped on the couch in a daze. Emmaline leaped to her feet but the zombie Colditz was already comming through the door, obeying some command to defend Julian. Emmaline screamed in frustration, then darted for the window, her lips forming hurried arcane sylabbles. She leaped at the window and crashed through the iron bars, transmuted to glass by her hasty spell. She plunged six feet to the tile roof a floor below, then slid down the incline disloding a tide off wooden shingles. She made a desperate grab for the edge but the shingle came away in her hand and she fell, crashing down into a decorative shrub.

"Stop her!" Julian roared from the window, moping at the blood running from his scalp. Emmaline leaped to her feet, hiked up her robe and sprinted off into the darkness.

Death and Desire: A Warhammer Fantasy RP

“We can hope the Sultan’s men are a messy white smear somewhere,” Calliope said grimly. Their escape from Copher had not been unnoticed, despite the fact that they had struck out to the east, rather than running west towards Lashiek and the bay of corsairs. They had seen the dust on the horizon for an hour or so before the Roc struck and had planned to slip away during the chill of the desert night. That, at least, was no longer a problem.

“What is this place?” Calliope mused, striking a light to a torch from the handful of possessions they had been able to steal before they fled the city.

“I am no scholar,” Bahadir replied.

“And here I was thinking you were a Doktor of Historaia,” Calliope snarked, though Bahadir merely looked blank at the unfamiliar Reikspeil terms.

“I have heard legends that when the Great Kings ruled across the Sands these lands were their distant satrapys,” Bahadir said and it was Calliope’s turn to run into the language barrier. Satrapy? He continued and she didn’t have to reveal her ignorance.

“When their governors displeased them, it was said they were forbidden to return to their homeland in death as well as in life, and that they were entombed in the sands of Araby forever,”” Bahadir explained. Calliope grunted noncommittally as she edged into the tunnel. She reached her hand out into the column of falling sand and felt it run over her fingers for a few moments. Edging around it they found that the tunnel had been paved with large blocks of sandstones. Columns studded the walls supporting ancient almost illegible frescos. Dust from the sand fall billowed around their feet like fog and Calliope pulled her scarf around her face to stop it from tickling her nose. They pushed down the hallway into a large room. Idols of strange and forgotten gods sat on pedestals. Some were simple wood carvings, others were laced with gold or had eyes of semiprecious stones. Calliope leaned close to one that appeared to be a woman wrapped in a large snake. This idol looked newer and was considerably curvier than the other female deities present. The figures features looked almost Imperial, and its hair was highlighted with pale yellow chalk. Calliope looked upwards and saw that the roof was covered with faux constellations picked out in verdegied bronze.

“What is it that makes you southerners so eager to die? Too many dates? Lack of decent ale?” Calliope wondered.

The Namespace of the Rose

This is genius

De Trop Disgrace: Warhammer Fantasy RP

“Eleanor. Eleanor open the door!” Emmaline struggled out of the bath she had been luxuriating in, splashing water all over the floor. She stepped out and immediately slipped on the dark wooden floor, comically pin wheeling her arms before landing on her rump in a crash.

“Lady Eleanor?! Are you ok?! Julian’s shrill voice came through the door, “are you ok.”

“Vhat are you goeng to do break down le doair?” she called back acidly as she scrambled to her feet and towleed herself off.

“What?” Jullian called back, unable to penetrate the accent through the thick timber door.

“Ould on a momon,” she called, pulling on a gown and stumbling into the main room. She turned they key and pulled the door open. Julian nearly fell into the room, all but scratching at the door. His earnest face was pale and his lips were visibly trembling. His eyes bulged at her state of relative undress and his pale face suffused with a blush so deep Emmaline worried he was about to pass out.

“Well? Why aré you breakeng down mon doair and intairrupteng mon bath?” she demanded. Julian opened and closed his mouth like a fish. Emmaline snapped her fingers repeatedly under the boy’s nose.

“Oh ahhh… men just arrived, men from my father,” he whined, all but wringing his hand. Emmaline manuvered him onto a couch and thrust a glass of schnapps into his hand. He swallowed it in a convulsive gulp then gasped as the liquor’s burn hit. Emmaline plucked the glass from his hand before he could drop it.

“Zo mén arrived from yur fathair…” Eleanor prompted, struggling to reign in her mounting frustration. Julian blinked and then seemed to return to himself.

“They are closeted with Colditz now,” he explained, “I think there is a priest with them.”

“A priest?” Eleanor asked then her eyes widened.

“Eez 'e haire to marry uz do you think?” she asked. Julian looked momentarily confused.

“I… I think he might have found out about… no, I wont let it happen!” he cried then leaped to his feet and rushed out of the room.

“Julian!” Emmaline yelled after him confused and starting to grow a little afraid. She looked down at the schnapps bottle in her hand and took a long drink, then quickly started dressing.

The screams came a half hour later once Emmaline was dressed and heading out in search of Julian. They seemed to come from the valley and what they portend Emmaline had no idea. She slipped from the room and to her surprise Colditz and his guards were no where to be found. Emmaline wasted only a few minutes to grab a few valuable items then headed for the stables, willing to take advantage of whatever breaks came her way. More screams came from the house as whe was pulling a saddle onto an expensive looking horse. There was something fell on the air and she could feel a knot of ice in her stomach. The need to get away from this place was a desperate throbbing thing. The buckles were just about in place when a hand fell on her shoulder. Emmaline screamed and tried to twist away but the fingers gripped like iron. She was whirled around and found herself face to face with Colditz. Or what was left of his face. Great bloody rents had been torn in it with what looked like claws and his palor was cold and dead. Witchfires burned in his eyes and though he had not yet the grey color of the grave the stink of dark sorcery poured off the cadaver. Other horrors, older fleshless skeletons stained with graveyard earth and moss joineed Colditz, hemming her in. Screaming she was dragged infront of the manor.

“It is ok Eleanor, it will be ok!” Julian was shouting, his eyes wide and wide with shock. Emmaline could pick out burst blood vessels in his face and dark magic coiled around him.

“I learned this at university, I know it looks bad but I promise I’ll keep you safe… I’ll let you….” he trailed off shooting her an agonized look as he realised that if he let her, or anyone else go the truth of what he was would get out. He was a necromancer. A wizard who tampered with the forces of life and death and was forever damned by the poison of dark magic.

“Look I’ll think of something,” he promised. One of the chambermaids stumbled from the manor and was struck down by a skeleton with a scythe. Julian whimpered then muttered something, the maid rose jerkily to join a growing perimeter around the house.

"Julian! Julian! You have to let me go!" Emmaline shrieked, momentarily forgetting her accent.

“I’ll think of something,” Julian promised as the zombie of Colditz dragged Emmaline screaming into the house.

Heroes of The Guard: A Warhammer 40K RP

“Why are you not training with the rest of your platoon Corporal?” Commissar Sobek seemed to appear from nowhere as Sel rounded a corner. She had her first pocket full of credits from the blackmarket deal and managed to avoid jumping out of her skin only by dint of the fact that this was the third such ambush in the two weeks since the fight. She still flinched but no guardsmen was so pure that the sudden appearance of a Commissar wouldn’t unsettle them.

“Sir!” Sel replied, stiffening to something like attention but not attempting a salute. The distant thump of boots on deck plates told her that the platoon was running the assault course in a nearby hold. Distant strains of cadence song echoed through the cavernous steel haulways.

“You ask my why I’m a guardsman,
Ask me why I sleep in a ditch,
It isn’t so much that I’m stupid,
It is just I don’t want to be rich.”

Sel brought her heart rate under control and straightened up, trying to ignore the roll of credit notes in her pocket which suddenly weighed about a thousand pounds. Sobek glared at her, eyebrow arched, awaiting explanation.

“It isn’t my unit Sir,” she explained, “I’m temporarily attached…”

“As a driver, yes I know,” Sobek interrupted. “So I can expect to see you training with your… sentinel pilots?” The words sounded like a curse. Sel ran her hand through her hair and affected an air of confusion.

“You’d have to ask Lieutenant Caradwalden sir, I’m supposed to be at his disposal,” Sel replied. Sobek glowered at her, his lip curling in contempt at the mention of Kayden’s name.

“Perhaps I should speak with him regarding finding you some duties?” Sobek suggested.

“Sir,” Sel responded, neither agreeing or disagreeing, while politely suggesting he get the frak on with. Sobek glared at her for a moment longer, balked by the lack of engagement, then stepped out of her way.

“Continue with… whatever it is you are doing Corporal Seldon,” Sobek ordered. Sel considered it a very bad sign that a member of the Commisariat knew her name but she merely clicked her ankles together and headed off down the oily smelling corridor. She turned a corner towards Kayden’s office and paused. Her eyes caught a flicker of movement in the shadows ahead. It might be rats, but her hive instincts found it easier to believe that a couple of Langeroth troopers with pipe wrenches or entrenching tools. Had Sobek been deliberately holding her in place while they got in position. It seemed far fetched but Sel hadn’t survived these past five years by taking an unnecessarily rosy view of the situation. There had been several fights already, jostling in mess lines, collisions in the showers, that kind of thing. Sel felt a sudden conviction that she should look in on her unit. She turned left and jogged down the hall. This was going to come to killing before the voyage was out or she was a Catachan.

Wealth and Warpstorms

Camilla led the way up the side of the depression, pulling down dust goggles and wrapping her face with a sand scarf before they reached the scouring winds at the top of the ravine. The desert stretched out before them, painted in a beautiful variety of earth tones which were kept eternally sharp by the low intensity storm of airborne grit. The sun was going down but there brillian moons were coming up to replace it, the illumination becoming both more diffuse and brighter as a result, seeming to cool the color tones.

"Yvrine already swept up here with auspex," Camilla half shouted as Alcander joined her, pulling the collar of his duster high in imperfect protection. His own personal unit was out and scanning but his keen eyes were sweeping the area as aggresively as the electronics.

"Maybe shae missed soomthin," he called, pointing to a beeping reading on his own handheld unit.

Tricksters and Theives: A Warhammer RP

One of the things that Emmaline had always loved about Altdorf is that it never slept. Even as the hour moved towards midnight the streets of the upper city still bustled with rowdy celebrants staggering from tavern to tavern. Students still gathered in the platz and shouted at each other in drunken debates. Pie sellers and street vendors still hawked their wares at the street corners with well practiced cries. Whores called out promises of exstacy from balconies and knockingshop doors. The fog gave all this a very strange aura, refracting voices and seeming to materialize people a few feet ahead and vanish them a few feet behind. Emmaline was sure that Altdorf's legion pickpockets was making full use of the unusual conditions as they approached the Tower of Blackhaven.

"They call that an iron works?" Neil whispered derisievly. The street droped closer to the Reik here, houses and shops giving way to a network of armorers, blacksmiths, swordsmiths, coopers, farriers, gunsmiths and bell founders which lay along this portion of the Reik. By ordanance of the city, these had to stop work after sundown so that the clamor of their anvils would not keep half the city awake. Smoke still drifted from the brick chimneys of many, as most artisans chose to keep the fires low rather than let them go out entirely. The paving here was new and fitted together so tightly a knife blade could not be passed between any two stones. This was a result of the numerous dwarves who lived in this quater. They had grown so frustrated with the work of 'manlings' and the constant delays caused by wagon breakdowns that they had clubbed together to create what the locals jokingly called 'Backfire Pass' owing to the fact that the good road led to twice as many wagons thronging it and actually making the conjestion worse.

"How will we get the boys back to the farms once they have seen Nuln," Emmaline joked as she lead the way through the back alleys towards the distant shape of Blackhaven. The tower had once been a turent in one of the earlier citywalls that had long since been swallowed by Altdorf's growth. It had partially collapsed as a result of people scavenging for stones but had been saved by a wizard who had moved in and constructed a private Tower. The job had been done with more enthusiasm than skill, so that a rickety series of half timbered floors had been piled ontop of the original tower until it nearly trebled in height. A great iron chimeny ran from the top of the old stonework to the peak of the tower carrying the smoke from several floors up beyond the conical tile roof.

"Looks like it might come down at any minute," Neil opined as he gazed at it skeptically across the empty courtyard that surrounded it. A wrought iron fence sectioned off some wild looking gardens that were overgrown and forboding in the fog.

"That is a cheery thought," Emmaline agreed, still slightly bugged from the Bugmans. She crossed quickly to the fence but laid a restraining hand on Neil's shoulder when he made to vault it. Emmaline muttered several syllables and then pulled two of the bars appart as though parting branches.

"Neat trick," Neil observed as he followed her through. It was always better to pass through barriers rather than break them when it came to magic. Much less chance of setting off countermeasures.

"You aren't the only thing that is putty in my hands," she assured him as they reached the base of the Tower. Neil laid a hand on the heavy fieldstone and mortar construction.

"Do you have a way through this?" he asked. Emmaline pointed towards a window several stories above.

"I'll stay here and keep watch, you can lower a rope to me when it is safe," she said sweetly.

Death and Desire: A Warhammer Fantasy RP

Long they strove with axe and sword
with might blows and corteous word
Comrades through blood and danger passed
To battle now til one breathed their last
Of such feats the bards do sing
such beauty in the axes swing
and poetry of knife and sword
that would the very god's have awed.

The sand which drank the oceans tears
shook with lusty blood mad cheers.
And though the lusty mamba led the dance
the Namir not from his purpose glanced
and ruse or trick could from fury take
the brutal blows that axe did rake
Until with tears of anguish in his eyes
Tiger smote the snake no more to rise

~Araybian Folk Song

The guards carried Calliope from the field, her limp body hanging between them. Blood soaked the front of her tunic in such volume that there could be no doubt she was dead, even if several thousand people hadn't watched Bahadir's axe hit her cleanly between the breasts. The crowd was roaring, some of them chanting Bahadir's name, others bemoaning the fortunes they had lost by wagering on the pirate. The guards themselves were muttering about this very thing as they hurled her body off a stone dock into the back of the corpse cart which waited, already loaded with bodies, to be driven out into the desert to dump the carrior for jackals and buzzards to dispose of.

_______________________

"This is the man," the vizier declared pointing at Bahadir through the bars of his cell. There was dissapointment in his eyes for he would have much prefered to butcher the pirate, but so long as she was dead it made little difference to him. Bahadir backed up in his cell as two mamlukes with pikes stepped forward, meaning to skewer him where he stood. Unfortunately the cell was large enough that if the slave kept himself pressed against the back wall, they couldn't quite reach him.

"Don't be tedious," the vizier sneered, "try to die with some dignity slave."

"Maybe an example would help?" someone whispered in his ear. THe vizier half turned an arm locked around his head and he felt naked steel at his throat. From the corner of his eye he caught sight of Calliope and trembeled, momentarily beliving her to be a vengeful ghost.

"By Allah how..."

Calliope could have told him. She could have explained how she had kept the wineskin from the previous night, how she had patiently kept her wound flowing so that she could collect blood and mix it with the wine. She could have told him how she had placed the blood filled flask between her breasts before the fight, perhaps even explained how Bahadir had deliberately struck her just so, so that the wineskin would burst and she would appear to be slain. She might even have told him how she hid under the pile of corpses until dark, then stole a dagger. Why she had come back at all was harder for her to explain, though perhaps a promise to a ship mate, even the piss poor ships they made here, was worth something. She explained none of this, instead before he could speak another word she raked the blade across his throat so hard she felt it grind on bone. The vizier made a noiseless bubbling scream, his wind pipe no longer reaching his vocal cords. Calliope shoved him into the one of the guards, who staggered aside cursing. The other tried to withdraw his pike from the bars, only to have Bahadir snatch the weapon free, then drive the butt end into the soliders stomach. Calliope cut both their throats before they could recover themselves enough to scream. Blood was already pooling on the floor. Calliope took the key from the nearest guard and opened the cell.

"There is a cart filled with deadmen waiting to take us out of the city, and I think I've seen enough of its delights for the time being."