In the meantime I thought I'd share some of the longer book I'm working on for this character. Hope you enjoy it.
-Tole
Downtime
sucks. There’s not a more delicate way to put it. I worked hard to become the
best at what I am, so I live to test those skills against the next challenge.
When the next challenge is taking its sweet fucking time showing up I get a bit
testy. Sometimes I will take a trip into my memory and relive some event from
my past. Once upon a time I used deep meditation and even a consciousness
altering substance or two to enhance the memories. That was before I met Valsh.
Valsh
is an orc shaman on Orta’ahn, an orc dominated world. Imagine if Sauron were an
orc and had won the battle for Middle Earth. That’s Orta’ahn. It’s beautiful in
its brutality. Only the strongest survive there, and it feels like a second
home. I’m not the strongest by a long shot, but I’m smart and fast and that’s
enough. They respect me for the killer I am. The ability to deal death in a
decisive manner speaks more to them than any amount of gold ever could.
Valsh
hired me to kill his War Leader. Apparently the old fellow was starting to lead
his tribe into battles that were costing them dearly and his strategies had
begun to cost them victories. Unfortunately he also had a very loyal cadre of
personal guards that kept any significant challenge to his rule from getting
close enough to do anything about it. That’s where I came in. I’m considerably
smaller than even an orc runt, as if one of those would survive long enough to
be able to compare it to me, so I was able to move around the camp relatively
unnoticed. Only took me about two days to find my way into the old bastard’s
tent at night and end his rule, but that’s a story for another day.
Valsh
rewarded me with memory totems. I remember reading an article in my first life
about how some psychiatrist, psychologist, self-actualization guru, or some
shit had this theory that all memories are complete in our minds we just lose
the ability to recall them. They said that with the proper mental discipline
and through the use of meditation techniques we can recall even the smallest
detail of a particular event in our lives. We can remember every smell, taste,
sound, emotion, even if we didn’t give it our full attention at the time. It’s
all encoded in our memories. I never got to that level with mental discipline
and/or chemical enhancement. The memory totems pull all of that out of our
minds and copy it into themselves. When you use one, it’s like being there all
over again.
The
orcs use them to store tribal history because their written language is as
basic as they are. Not much use for scholars in a war driven culture, but you
do need to keep records of important battles and victories. Warriors use them
on the battlefield to record their deaths to bring honor to their families. You
can imagine how precious these things are, and I have about thirty of them in a
magically sealed chest in my room. I’m very well regarded among several of the
tribes on Orta’ahn.
Anyway,
back to the fact that downtime sucks. You can only train so much until muscle
memory takes over and you hit the target every time. When I get to that point I
turn to the memory totems kind of the way Sherlock would turn to his 7%
solution just to pass the time until the next case came along. The problem with
that is, just like Holmes’ cocaine, my memories are addictive and the more I use
them the more I want to. Most of what I’ve stored there are memories of times
with my wife, and when I use them, I want to stay in those memories as long as
I can. She was glorious.
Bobby
used to give me shit about not looking into her death. He just never understood
why, if I loved her so deeply, I didn’t dig into why she was taken in the first
place. I always told him I’m a killer not a detective. I’d dealt with the son
of a bitch who killed her and that was all the closure I needed. That being
said, as I stand here looking at this shelf I realize that every single one of
these fucking totems holds a memory of her and our time together.
Huh.
Maybe I’m not as done with it as I thought.
I
carefully put the memory totem I have in my hand back in its place on the
shelf. I close the door and activate the wards. I go sit on my bed and stare at
that cabinet full of my former life. It only takes me about two seconds to make
up my mind. Fuck it. Time to learn some new skills and go be a detective. If it
just so happens I get to kill a few more mother fuckers tied up in her death,
all’s the better.
First
things first though. I’m starving. Thinking about it I can’t remember the last
time I ate. That happens when I get lost
in my memories. Better go get some Bobby
Stew.
I
sit down at the bar and Bobby turns to me. “Wondered if you were ever coming
out of the goddam room,” he says with a grin.
“Don’t
need smartass man. I need food and
beer. Hook me up would ya?”
He
turns back to the stove where the stew is bubbling away and dishes me up a big
bowl of the meaty goodness. He also gets
me a really nice dark beer and a couple of hard rolls. I’m in heaven.
“Hey
Bobby,” I start and he turns to me with a quizzical look on his face. “You know
much about that piece of shit bounty hunter I cooked in your hearth a few years
back?”
He
turns to face me fully and lowers himself down to eye level with me and fixes
me in his gaze.
“Bout
fucking time,” he says.
He
reaches under the bar and takes out a well-oiled old wooden box. He opens the
lid and takes out a medallion made of some tarnished metal that looks kind of
like old brass. “Been keeping this thing
for when this day finally came. Knew
you’d want it. Fell off of the corpse as you were dragging it across the
floor. Guild crest for that dickhead’s
bounty hunter gang. It’s a good place to
start.”
I
stop with a bite of stew halfway to my mouth and just look at it. After a
second or two I set my spoon down and take it from him. It’s lighter than I thought it would be. Probably similar to challenge coins back on
Terra. Kinda shows who’s who in the
guild.
“Thanks
Bobby,” I say and put it in my coat pocket and go back to my meal. I should be
able to use it to create a passage to the Goran home world from The Bar. Kinda
how this place works. You need an anchor
to open a portal to a world. Something
to guide the magic to a destination.
I
finish my bowl of stew and then another chasing them down with a really good
dark that I bring back from Terra when I go to work there. While I am chewing it gives me time to think
about what exactly I’m going to do. I
mean hell, I’m usually the subject of an investigation not the one carrying it
out. The thought of me being on that
side of the equation makes me laugh a little, and it catches Bobby’s attention.
“What?”
he asks.
“Just
amused by the absurdity of me trying to solve a murder instead of commit one
man. I thought when I killed that son of a bitch that I was through with the
whole deal you know? Figured life is tough and shit wants you dead. Trick is to kill the things that want you
dead before they get to you. Never gave it much more thought than that.”
He
looks across the bar with a crooked grin on his goddamn ugly face and says,
“Something tells me you’re gonna get plenty of chances to do what you’re best
at. If you’re lucky, you might even get some answers to the shit that’s been
eating you. A man should know why bad shit happens in his life, if for no other
reason than to try and keep it from coming back around.”
