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Part Three: Losing My Religion (Or: An REM Soliloquy)
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Name:
Calaf, Wayfarer.
Rank:
Squire
Level:
41
Status:
126/126 (Dehydrated (level 4))
Status: Dehydration (level 4)
Effect: STR -4, END -4, CHR -2, AGL -6, INT -2. Debuffs with a bevy of reduced core stats. Effect compounds with higher levels of dehydration.
There was no further watering hole on the north side of the desert. The path was well-tread, sand compressed and even sunken into the ground in a deep gully at points. Still, the sands baked under the oppressive high summer sun.
Unknown hours, maybe days, passed. Calaf’s negative status ticked higher:
Status: Dehydration (level 5)
Effect: STR -5, END -6, CHR -4, AGL -6, INT -4. Debuffs with a bevy of reduced core stats. Effect compounds with higher levels of dehydration.
Behold, the good people of the church! The unwanted thought crept into Calaf’s head. The salt of the earth. Those whose livelihood you were duty-bound to protect.
Such was the definition of Paladin. A champion of chivalry. Hammer of the faith.
Sand sunk into his armored boots as Calaf walked. Weighing him down further.
The purpose of chivalry was to protect the innocent. The reality of chivalry was to smite enemies, real or perceived.
The reality was that Calaf’s shield was to be a great, implacable wall against evil and corruption. In reality, his shield was meant to protect a designated holy site so pilgrims could run through it in an assembly line, one after another.
The purpose of a Paladin was to be a defender of the faith with honor and discipline. In reality, the role was to serve as brute muscle for the church, a dumb and expendable spear for hire used to dispatch reformists that the masses at large would only ever consider to be heretical apostates. But if Joan and Cayo were the standard for heretics, then countless apostates of old were surely well-meaning and had been dispatched just as ruthlessly.
Never had Calaf been quite so disillusioned. The bright golden sand of the desert appeared muted and grey. Perhaps his Menu was mis-calibrated.
A dire-elephant skull stood at the edge of the path. The spot where its nose once sat was now hollow. Like a single big eye staring back at the Squire. Etchings in the whitewashed skull indicated spots where generations of pilgrims had written their names into this landmark over the years.
There hadn’t been dire-elephants in the desert for many centuries. Try though he did to recall when they went extinct in this region, that debuff to his Intelligence stat was getting in the way.
It was the only landmark Calaf had seen all day. He left it behind without investigating, having lost all appetite for being in the presence of death.
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Firefield appeared in the far distance, aglow in the night and a wavy haze during the day. It remained there after two days of travel. Ever distant but seemingly within reach, constantly and forever.
The next watering hole was dried up for the season. His canteens were empty. And that dehydration status kept creeping up slowly and steadily.
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A night passed with Calaf trying to press on. When dawn came and the scorching sun rose overhead, he found he’d barely cleared a single dune. With every step, he was beginning to move slower...
Status: Dehydration (level 8)
Effect: STR -8, END -8, CHR -5, AGL -10, INT -6. Debuffs with a bevy of reduced core stats. Effect compounds with higher levels of dehydration. Reduces HP by half.
With maximum HP now capped at 63, Calaf had taken an even greater hit to his combat preparedness. This was growing dangerous, even deadly. He needed to find any amount of water. A full canteen, condensation dripping off a palm tree’s ferns. Hell, drool from a dire-camel. Anything would do!
Calaf fell to his knees. He felt the dehydration gauge skyrocketing upwards. Another level and it would be too late. He could barely walk already. The sounds of desert wind cut out, and he could barely feel the sensation of sand creeping through his armor any longer. Firefield was right there – his vision still worked, albeit blurrily – but it had looked as if it were right there for days now.
“Alaf!”
A strange sound came from his back. He couldn’t make it out. When Calaf turned he found everything to the north was a blurry amalgamation of dunes. He’d be easy prey against one of the high desert’s many dire-beasts.
“Calaf-”
A slender figure moved amongst the dunes. Only coming into focus as she was danger close. Calaf looked up, dumbfounded.
“Charlotte?”
A woman with an eyepatch and thick, frazzled hair approached. The exact opposite of Charlotte in every way. Black-haired instead of blonde. Curls instead of a fine part. A fallen Sister and relic thief where Charlotte was a deaconess. A murderer, and a church medic. Caring… straightforward… earnestly concerned for his safety… in all these areas, Jelena was a known quantity.
Without responding to Calaf’s case of mistaken identity, Jelena brought forth a spare canteen, of which she had several. She offered it to Calaf, only to discover that the Squire could barely lift his arms, let alone interact with the gift via Interface.
“Here.” She popped the top off and angled it up to his mouth. “Been following you for days.”
Calaf greedily placed his lips around the canteen and chugged the water. Immediately his condition saw improvement. That dehydration status began to tick down.
"Enkidu. He’s over here! Bring the kid!” Jelena said.
Water spilled out of Calaf’s mouth. He couldn’t get enough. Still, he sat on his knees, drinking from Jelena’s lifegiving canteen, all while the oasis city of Firefield loomed in the background.
“Ah…” Calaf caught his breath as the canteen ran dry.
“I’m here,” Jelena said, gazing upon him with a furrowed brow. “What’s wrong? You could’ve gotten as many canteens as you needed at the last stop…”
No words came to Calaf. He looked up at Jelena, as the sun formed a bright halo around her face.
That’s one way in which Charlotte and this relic thief were perfectly identical. Despite achieving it in opposite fashions, both Charlotte and Jelena did share this status:
They were both undeniably beautiful.
Before Calaf could open his mouth and say something uncouth and embarrassing, he felt the world spin. That dehydration designation was back down to level 2, but a new status appeared.
“What the heck is… water intoxication?”
Calaf’s head swayed like his neck was a swivel. He collapsed to the desert floor as Jelena called for Enkidu to hurry.
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When Calaf next awoke he was in a surprisingly plush bed.
“I didn’t die, did I?”
It felt like death. Like he’d passed beyond the veil of zero hit points and been preserved by a priest or deacon to be resurrected on that blessed day. It was a promise to all faithful. The moment one was Branded, by conversion or birth, it was their fate to be interred in the church crypts for future awakening. Every Branded cadaver left to rot was a failure of the church’s founding compact, even if necessity required heretics and mass casualty events to be resolved by burning instead. At the very least, not a single corpse was to be left to turn fetid.
No, the room he found himself in was not some cold underground church crypt. The heat of a Firefield day poked through a narrow window, covered by a slit for privacy. And the ceiling was too ornate.
A comfy bookshelf stood against the far wall. The nature of the books appeared a little… church-inappropriate. They weren’t hymnbooks, that’s for sure. The lone door into the room was at once hefty but also locked only by a single deadbolt.
“Bouncers need to kick the doors in sometimes. Clients get rowdy.”
Jelena’s signature desert drawl proved easy enough to recognize. Indeed, there was another figure in the bed with Calaf. It was nothing scandalous, even for the aspiring Paladin’s puritanical morals! For his head lay in her lap, while her hands alternated between stroking his cheek and hair and feeding him some water and hydration-enhancing grapes.
“Scared me there, handsome.” Jelena smiled.
“No problem, Hot Shot.”
Now this was an act of true charity. Any lingering resentment Calaf had for Jelena’s many crimes – even the murder of his hometown Pryor – wafted away. His cheeks grew warm, looking up at Jelena’s angelic face. Was he thinking straight? Or was his soft spot for the former Sister Turandot a result of some kind of, as the deacons say, ‘hormonal revelation.’
Two tender, caring eyes looked down at Calaf. Only one could see. The other was dull purplish, unfocused, with a ruined Brand dead center covering the pupil.
Calaf touched the hand she kept near his cheek.
From this position, he could really see why she wore such a big eyepatch. Scouring the Brand took took a fair chunk of skin off her cheek as well. Still, and overwhelming warmth and genuine concern shined through the thief's scar-damaged visage.
Moreover, she was positively gorgeous beneath that eyepatch, and the scaring only accentuated it all. Calaf tried to ignore that for the moment, lest he say something regrettable in his still-woozy state.
“You saved me,” he said. “Thank you, truly. But… where are we?”
“I see he survived,” growled a figure from the corner. “I’ll go keep the girl company. Outside. Far outside. Maybe even at the market.”
“Go do that,” Jelena chuckled.
During a pregnant pause as Enkidu opened the door to leave, the sounds of… something uncouth… wafted into the chamber. Calaf blushed, just barely registering the distant sounds of sinful iniquity.
Only after Enkidu left the room did Jelena continue.
“Okay, don’t freak out. But…” Jelena gritted her teeth. “... We’re kind of in a north-end Firefield brothel.”
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