Ch.28
Frankly, I was more than a little disappointed when I entered the Adventurer’s Guild. It looked like it might have been able to meet my expectations at one time, but now I could only see six people in the huge building that resembled an enormous tavern more than anything.
One was a very cute young woman behind a counter. There were two older, grizzled looking men playing some kind of board game that looked vaguely like checkers, and two teenaged boys and a girl, none of whom could have been older than seventeen.
Off to one side was the Hearthflame. Seeing it I walked straight over to it.
Off to one side I heard someone say, “Hey. You there. Who are you?”
I’ll admit I was kinda of focused on the Hearthflame, so I ignored the teenager’s annoyed demands of my identity.
“Hey, YOU! Stop!” That got my attention, and it’s a good thing, too, because otherwise I might not have been able to block the KNIFE THROWN AT MY FACE! The Deflect Arrows Feat was more than up to the task, letting me knock the knife aside pretty easily, and as I turned to look in the direction it had come from, I saw one teen staring at me in horror, and his two teen companions looking at him in shock and disbelief.
I was pretty mad, to be honest, that anger only mitigated by the fact that I didn’t think that a throwing knife could get through my DR, but that wasn’t really the point. What this moron just did was the equivalent of trying to shoot someone for not responding to them. Even if you missed, you still aimed and pulled the trigger, his intent had been to stab me with a knife. In the side of the head.
Even if it was a complete accident, he’d still been playing with a knife... but the rotation had been too perfectly for it to really be accidental.
I turned and walked over to where the knife had fallen and brought it back to where the three teens were seated.
The one who had thrown it was probably the leader. He had short black hair, blue eyes, and the beginnings of a goatee that was more peach fuzz than facial hair, plus a light dusting of freckles. He might have been five feet eight inches tall, looked like he weighed in at a bit under 160 pounds and couldn’t have been more than sixteen years old. He was wearing a brown cloth tunic under a suit of hardened leather armor. He had a bandoleer of throwing knives and a pair of short swords on his hips.
The other boy was a lot bigger than the leader; six foot two inches tall, 220 or 230 pounds or so and maybe a year or so older. He had brown hair and brown eyes, and he was wearing a steel breastplate. Seated next to him was a large wooden shield and a wedge-shaped one-handed axe with a hammer head opposite the blade; a small sledge axe, basically.
The girl was pretty in a girl-next-door kind of a way. Blond hair, blue eyes, five foot four inches tall, maybe 140 pounds and in great shape... he looked about the same age as the leader. She wasn’t a supermodel, but just what most people would call pretty. There was an unstrung long bow next to her, a quiver of arrows on her back, a short sword and a dagger sitting on each hip. She was also wearing a suit of hard leather armor, though she also had a dark green hooded cloak on.
I rammed the throwing knife into the table in front of Leader Guy, using Power Attack to ram it into the table all the way down to its hilt! “You dropped this. You should be more careful with sharp things – people might misunderstand your intentions.” I told him, my voice almost trembling with rage.
Huh? Maybe those old anger issues aren’t as well handled as I thought? Deep breaths, Ray.
I paused for a second and took a couple of deep breaths.
I heard two chairs scrape back and saw from the corner of my eye that the two older men were headed towards me.
The girl was doing a decent job of hiding it, but Sense Motive told me she was scared, the two boys were afraid as well but were hiding it better. She was the one who spoke up first, though. “We’re sorry, mister, it was an accident.” She looked like she had more to say, but a nasty look from Leader Guy shut her up.
You know what, screw this place and fuck this little ass hole.
I reached out and slapped Leader Guy across the face as hard as I could. As a monk, I can choose to do purely non-lethal damage. I did so and knocked the little shithead out cold.
I then looked his two friends right in their eyes, then I cut the table in half with a Versatile Unarmed Strike flavored karate chop. Boom! It was loud and honestly a bit more impressive than I’d planned, honestly.
I pointed down at their unconscious friend on the floor. “Your friend there is either an idiot or a psychopath. When he wakes up, tell him that the next time I see him I expect an honest apology from him, ON HIS KNEES. Also, you two should start looking for better friends. This one’s gonna get you killed.”
Then I ignored them and walked over to the Hearthflame, then bound myself to it. A second later I was in front of the Guild’s Job Board, looking for something that would get me some Records and maybe some more loot! Looking it over felt very weird, because I understood the writing perfectly, even though it was not in English.
“Um, excuse me? Sir?” I looked down at the girl who had been behind the counter. “Um, are you an Adventurer’s Guild member? Maybe from out of town?”
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I looked down at her. She was a pretty little thing. She looked like she was either elven or maybe half elven? Barely over five feet tall, maybe 110 pounds, soaking wet. Curly black hair, pointed ears, blue eyes like sapphires. She was closer to little girl cute than beautiful, and she was obviously nervous.
I looked at her and counted backwards from ten trying to control my annoyance which wasn’t really aimed at her. “No, ma’am, I am not a Guild member. Not sure I wanna be, now, either.” I said, looking meaningfully at Leader Guy, still out cold and being carried out the door by his friends.
She grimaced. “Um, well, then I’m going to need you to pay for the damages you caused, then, sir.”
Shit. Let’s try the ‘I am famous’ tactic!
I sighed. “First off, I’m Battlesage Ramirez. What’s your name?”
She frowned at me changing the subject but looked a tad bit relieved. “My name is Regina Hollyoak, but everyone calls me Gina!” she told me, very enthusiastically.
Sheesh! Her enthusiasm is pretty close to weapon’s grade!
I smiled and nodded. “It's nice to meet you, Gina. Now why don’t you explain to me why you think I owe you money?”
Gina frowned at me. “The Guild’s policy is a strict, ‘You break it, you bought it’ policy. You broke the table, so the Guild’s rules say you need to pay for it!” she told me, with a huge smile on her face.
I looked at her like she was a little crazy. To be fair, I was pretty sure she was; no one can really be that peppy. “Huh? Well then, what are you going to pay me for being lethally assaulted on the grounds of your Guild by one of its members?”
Poor thing, she couldn’t even look me in the eye. “I... that’s something you’d need to talk to the guild master about, sir!”
“And what happens if I refuse to pay?” I asked.
Now she looked like she was about to cry, and I was starting to feel really badly. “I’ll get yelled at! Then the guild master will come looking for you to get the money from you themself!” she blurted out.
I shook my head. “Well, is the guild master around for me to talk to right now?”
Still unable to look me in the eye, she shook her head. “I’m sorry, they aren’t.”
“Well, then, you tell the guild master to come find me and we’ll talk about his inability to teach his guild members proper manners, and THEN we’ll talk about whether or not I’m gonna pay him a penny for a wooden table he’s probably just gonna patch back together like has been done to the others I see in here.”
I sort of felt sorry for her, but it’s the principle of the thing. If he’s the guild master, then he’s at least responsible for how adventurers act inside of the guild itself... and that little shit threw a knife at me!
Sure, it probably couldn’t have hurt me, and even if it could it almost definitely couldn’t have killed me, but that’s really not the point! It pissed me off is the point, really. I guess.
Shit, now I almost feel bad. I definitely hadn’t handled any of that well... but I’m also not sure how else I should have handled it. Not doing anything gives people the idea that I don’t mind them throwing knives at my head, that's not a great precedent to set, but one-hit TKOing a weakling also feels bad.
In retrospect, at least, it feels bad... but it felt AWESOME when I did it! And there’s the problem, Ray.
Crap.
I walked out the door.
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It hadn’t been too hard finding stuff to do to make Records after all! The countryside around Thistleglade was covered with bandits, cultist camps, and monstrous humanoids; mostly Greenblood tribes of orcs and goblins.
I shied away from the Greenies. The average orcs and gobbos were easy for me to take down, but I’d run into a small war party led by a war chieftain of some kind with a pair of shamans with him, a female orc shaman and a goblin shammy, and that was WAY more than I could handle! The war chief showed up as being 10th level! I had no desire to try my luck with trying to fight a 10th level orc warrior with two healers and almost 200 followers!
I did go back and warn the captain of them. He sent out some scouts right away to see where they were headed towards, though he only wanted to make sure it wasn’t Thistleglade.
After informing him about the Greenblood warband, I went right back to hunting down bandits and cultists.
Things on Earth seemed to be under control – the two Federal Marshals said they thought they had something they might need my help with, but they didn’t have anything concrete, yet. Other than that, work was normal and the construction was coming along slowly.
I was still spending hours every day working on crafting and just practicing with my skills and training. I felt that I was making some progress, but I didn’t really know what to expect out of doing so.
In the meanwhile, I’d been experimenting with the classes I could take, determined to get as much value as I could out of the Legends & Labyrinths character system run by the Grand Method.
As it turns out, you can only have one Primary Class, and technically you’re only supposed to have one Secondary class before 6th level. Monk was my Primary, and Disciple my first Secondary.
I’d gotten lucky and been able to have two Secondary classes, since starting with two classes at 1st level meant they were both temporarily marked as Primary, which let me jump ahead of the curve and grab a Secondary Class when I was 3rd in both Monk and Disciple of Pneuma. It also meant I couldn’t take another secondary class at 6th, so it was really just a head start more than anything.
I’d gotten Soulblade to 3rd level, which gave me some really cool upgrades. Now, when I formed my mind blade, it was automatically a +1 magic weapon, an ability called Enhanced Mind Blade! It also gave an ability called Psychic Strike, which required a Move action to activate, but once discharged could be reformed by expending your psionic focus as a swift action. It did +1d8 psionic damage and was a different KIND of damage than the Psionic Weapon Feat. Psychic Strike was psionic damage and Psionic Weapon was psychokinetic damage.
Psykers generally referred to their psionic focus as their Halo, because when looked at through Detect Psionics someone who was maintaining psionic focus looked like they were surrounded by an aura, or a Halo, of psychic energy.
Also, people are generally lazy and 2 syllables to say Halo is way easier than 5 for psionic focus... and Halo sounds cooler, too!
Anyway, Psychic Strike and Psionic Weapon were generally fired simultaneously as something called a Halonic Discharge, or just a Halo Ring Strike. You generally fired off a Halonic Discharge the first time you attacked in a combat round – that’s per 6 seconds – although skills, items, and Feats could get that to 2 or 3 times per turn, even going as high as 5 or even 6 with all of the correct items, Feats, and high enough skill levels.
The difference was basically that psionic damage didn’t hurt things immune to mind affecting powers, but psychokinetic did. For an outside observer, it was pretty easy to tell how strong their Halonic Discharge was, if you had Psionic or Martial Lore, at least. Every +1d8 of Psychic Strike they had added a colored circle – a Halo – around their weapon.
Their color was always the same for every Mind Blade user... ROYGBIV, then white, black, and grey. It was nearly impossible to have more dice of Psychic Strike than ½ your level, so colors past grey were only in the realm of speculation. Your first +1d8 created a Red Halo Ring. The second made an Orange Halo Ring. Then a Yellow Halo, Green Halo, Blue Halo and so on. Psionic Weapon also created its own Halo Ring, but those Halo’s colors were specific to the user, as easily identifying them as a psionic fingerprint.
Each +1d6 from Psionic Weapon added a Halo Ring – so it added 2 Rings, and Greater Psionic Weapon added 4. The more Halo Rings you could manifest the stronger you were. Being able to manifest them faster and more often meant you were more skilled. Lots of Halo Rings and being able to use them more than once per combat round was a decent sign to not mess with that person!
They were, unfortunately, another thing to expend psionic focus and swift actions on, which meant that both of those things were starting to become a rare and precious resource!