Solitaire POV: Day 18

Current Wealth: 0 silver 0 copper

Current Debt: 6 gold 44 silver 20 copper

We’d been hungry for a week, dying one day at a time, withering and shutting down. It was the straw that broke the camel’s back when Corvan called on us, ordering another payment of the debt.

As it turned out, there hadn’t been more than three trolls in the forest. We found that out by spending days of our lives nearly freezing in the search, finally giving in only when we realised it was taking longer and longer for the feeling to rush back into our fingers.

Town was warmer, but still colder by the day, and we couldn’t even afford a shitting room anymore. We killed most of our daylight hours experimenting, trying to find the boundaries of our Class Abilities. The rest was used on hopelessness, and the desperate, pointless search for some opportunity to avoid starving.

My Detect Element, apparently, had been with me from level 1. We’d known that already of course, but it was only after a few days that I discovered it worked via taste, and deduced that the second level was when it had allowed me to just look at things for information.

Taste still gave me more though, it was how I’d gain insight to chemical percentages in a material, and without that there’d be all sorts of issues with trying to reliably create anything at all.

Of course we didn’t actually have the facilities to make something new yet, which meant it was, still, fucking useless. Just our luck. What was worse however was that Beam still hadn’t managed to find out what his Class Ability did by the week’s end.

Well, we didn’t give up easily on eating. We tried to find work, and there wasn’t any. Tried to hunt animals, and almost got arrested for poaching. Tried to simply beg in the streets. Got spat on.

I’d never liked people, always found them cruel, simple, irrational. Had I gone back to earth after my time here, it might actually have softened me up for them. Because modern humans were nothing compared to the savages I was living around now.

Yeah, savages. There’s no other word for them. Immoral, stupid animal-men. Their brains were shrivelled and undernourished, their ideology about as complex and moral as that of a rabid dog, and they still had the audacity to look at me with scorn for dying in front of them.

The rage in me grew with every day, so intense that it almost kept me warm against the snow and wind. Almost. But I didn’t have any real defence against the elements, and no defence against the hunger. All I could do was sit around and watch myself shrivel.

We had to move every night, because the guards would beat anyone sleeping in the same place too often as vagrants. After a while we were recognised- all over six feet, it wasn’t unexpected- and had to start sheltering away from sight altogether. There were gathering spots for such things, some even had fires burning, and we took a measure of solace in the company of other people.

When we’d left for our troll hunts, the sight of the beaten-down impoverished had elicited sympathy. Now we were among them. It had been a steep fall, but nowhere near as steep as our drop from earth to this stinking shithole in the first place. That thought kept me company more, even, than my friends did. I didn’t belong here. It wasn’t my place.

My place was at the top of this world. I was better than its people, and I would make them better by ruling it. Such a shame that justice wasn’t a universal force alongside gravity or friction. Such a shame that cruelty, apparently, was.

It was the eighteenth day, and I woke up stiff, achy, groaning. Beam and Xangô were already up beside me, looking about as bad as I felt, and the three of us took our customary few minutes of miserable silence before standing to do anything.

Not that there was much to do. Go to the temple for food, try, again, to find work. Kill the day until we were back somewhere warm and unknown enough to sleep safely without being killed by either the cold or the guards. Another day, another torment.

Beam spoke first, stretching, popping his joints and wincing. We’d all found that trying to move any fraction of our bodies only made the hunger more noticeable, somehow.

“I’m scared.”

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I heard him, but I didn’t understand him. Not at first. I just refused to. Beam had fought trolls without blinking, not even hesitated before charging a bear. He’d roundhoused something five times his weight. And he was scared.

The knowledge made me scared, but I hid it. Because I knew that my own fear would have very much the same effect on the others.

“We’ll find something to do.” I lied. “There must be work somewhere, and if not it’ll emerge eventually.”

Beam didn’t answer me, neither did Xangô. They both just looked ahead. Apparently even I could only tell the same lie so many times before being seen through.

“Any ideas, either of you?” I was actually more annoyed to have them not believe me than I was uncomfortable at the lack of hope. I thought a silent thanks to dear old mother, for that particular neurosis, and then pressed my friends when no answer came.

“I want to kill myself.”

I froze, Beam stared, and Xangô only continued staring ahead, as if he were completely oblivious to the effect his words had had on us.

“Don’t be stupid.” I snarled, and he carried on his aimless stare right up until I grabbed his shoulder. “Xangô!”

The look in his eyes stopped me. Complete calm, complete lucidity.

“I’m miserable, dying anyway and hopeless.” He told me, as if each fact was just the item on a shopping list. “If I’m going to end up some rotting corpse here, I’d rather die quickly than slowly.”

Finally his lip curled, the only expression of note he’d made today.

“I haven’t found a tall enough building yet.”

Since I was old enough to think about thinking, I’ve prided myself on how quickly I did it. A lot of emotions flitted through my mind at that, but the one I ended up settling on was resignation.

Everything Xangô had said made sense, every part of it was rational. It made me angry- furious- and miserable too, but none of that was his fault. The root issue here was where we’d ended up, and it’d be pathetically childish of me to forget that just because he’d decided not to lie about his intentions.

However mature and cerebral I might have reacted, my heart still broke all the same. I hid the fact with a practiced care.

It wasn’t much longer that we stayed there, come daytime the town cooled quicker than you might expect, and we’d learned its guards were practically cold-blooded in how their activity grew with the temperature. They’d leave the hideouts unchecked, by night, but the moment beer stopped freezing their patrols would continue as normal.

Within the hour we were walking our usual circuit around the place, asking around for jobs, mechanical and routine. Do the same thing enough times and it becomes a reflex, something your body is occupied by while your mind wanders. That wasn’t a good thing anymore, it hadn’t been ever since Xangô’s mind started wandering to his grave.

The lumberjacks had as many hands as they needed, as did the basic labourers. Nobody believed that we could help to even assist with the chemists- or as these morons called them, alchemists- and apparently signing on as a guard took a surprising amount of training. Presumably in learning how to get a sufficiently hard erection while bludgeoning poor people.

One failure, then another. Each one, now, feeling like another nail in our coffins. Each one making my blood warm a degree closer to boiling. Interesting, that was new. I was close to actually losing it. I wondered what I’d do when that finally happened.

As it turned out, fate had plans other than my finding out. Our trek around the town was interrupted by several very unwanted faces, making themselves known by encircling the three of us while we moved down an alley.

We all had a very particular memory associated with situations like this, and I specifically have a very particular reaction to encirclement period. The rock was already bursting one of the men’s lips when another gave his message.

“GOD! Fuck! Stop, wait, we’re here to talk!”

I was halfway through tossing another chunk of stone when Beam caught my hand, his strength still clear in the grip, even after another week of hunger and cold. Even after the beating these bastards had given us last time.

“What do you want?” Xangô demanded, his voice harsh and eyes combative. Was he intending to turn this into a fight? To die that way? Bloody selfish prick if he was, I had no intention to get stabbed in an alley.

The speaker answered him quickly, apparently fearful of another rock, by the way his eyes flitted to and from me every moment.

“We’re here with a request for a meeting, I’ll guess you already know who it’s from.”

Xangô paused, frowning in confusion.

“Hengrard?” He asked, then continued after receiving a nod. “What, does he want to beat us again?”

“Will you be accepting?”

I caught the flash of sunlight on brass knuckles, and heard the sound of a frozen puddle cracking behind us. From what I remembered, it had been a fairly deep one, and frozen almost fully through. A big bastard, then, to have enough weight for that. We wouldn’t be winning this fight any more than the last.

Xangô glanced at me questioningly, and I conveyed the fact as well as I could manage with nothing but a few spasming facial expressions. He seemed to get the gist, somehow, anyway.

“We accept.” He managed, tightly eyes still understandably untrusting.

“Lead the way.” He said, and they did.