[Farmlands] Naughty Deeds (Vluharqih) [Graded]

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Neronin
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[Farmlands] Naughty Deeds (Vluharqih) [Graded]

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717th Arc, #th Trial of Cylus
Etzos Farmlands


The desperation in the act did not elude him. He knew it was risky and almost insane. The necromancer was getting to the point where risk was mitigated by ability. He could kill most who would wander across him at this point. The necromancer had to remind himself that risk meant more than that though. His actions, if he did not find a safer, steadier source of bodies, would draw attention eventually. Graverobbers never made much around Etzos, so the empty graves would draw attention of some kind. He was sure with their prejudices, the people of Etzos would draw the correct, and worst conclusion. Necromancy.

He narrowed his eyes and squinted through the darkness of the surrounding countryside. He had spent more and more time outside the city as Cylus grew closer to its end. He needed to acquire enough to set himself up and some of his past attempts had...failed. He thought back to the near disaster at the farmhouse where he had lost one of his Marrows completely. The necromancy was now forced to shovel the dirt from the grave himself, all threw while set upon by the light rain that seemed to always be present here at the ass end of Cylus.

The soil churned Welty as he continued his work without complaint, not that there was anyone to listen. The rain puddled murkily around his feet where the hole was getting deeper. Occasionally some mud would collapse onto his robes and boots, but the necromancer didn't mind. The grime was nothing to him. It was what he had grown up in. It was simply the setting for his lonely journey to self-sufficiency.

Neronin felt his heart leap as his shovel made a dull, muffled thud in the soil as it touched wood. He bent and dropped the new tool outside the grave. Water spilled in a thin rivulet from the tip of his hood onto the dark wood as he searched with his fingers. He pulled muck away from the the hard surface of wood. He could not make it out in the dark, but felt for the coffin with tentative fingers. Neronin smiled and returned the shovel to his grasp, carefully beginning to clear the dark mud off of the grimy coffin. He had no idea how old the body would be or in what condition. The grave was a sad thing, tucked off the road near a dilapidated farmstead.

The mage had taken to wandering the nearby areas looking for such family grave sites to bring back to Mongrel's cave for study. It had mixed results. Some, like the farm he had visited a few days ago, had almost identified him, though that was the only one that had actually cost him any thralls. Some simply had corpses so far decayed that it took him almost as long to return them to a useable state as it would have taken him to simply make corpses out of the living. Some farmers had taken to setting torches out near their graveyards, clearly warned that some grave robber or other such monstrous being was about. It was a damnable inconvenience.

Neronin was jerked out of his reverie by a suspicious noise nearby. He stood straight up and surveyed the surrounding darkness with narrowed eyes. He began to gather his necromantic energies, just incase. He didn't have a thrall, but he could make a haunt if it was required...
word count: 586
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Vluharqih
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[Farmlands] Naughty Deeds (Vluharqih)

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The rain beat down, dripping off her feathers as she trudged through the ankle high mud. She wasn't sure what had happened to the snow, but the temperature had obviously become just warm enough to send this freezing drizzle down instead. She shivered once more, casting a miserable gaze around the road.

She couldn't see more than a dozen feet in any direction, the sheets of rain giving the world a dim, dark appearance in the twilight that was Cylus. The last hints of snow were still piled up in drifts and about the tree wells, persistent in their defiance of the downpour.

Valyeria shook her wings out, water flying off the tips and pulled her soaking cloak around her body once more. Head down, she forced her limbs to keep moving as she tried to ignore the anger that was boiling in her stomach. But with every step, she became more and more pissed off at her supplier.

The man had told her there had been a problem via a note in the latest shipment. She had taken the whole trial off to ride out to the ass end of nowhere, arriving to the farm only to find his dead body in pieces scattered across his hovel- whatever complaint he had was lost when he died.

It hadn't taken her long to run into the cause- a large wolf, its head standing above her waist. She had morphed into the Velox, snarling and snapping. There hadn't actually been a fight, just posturing and intimidation, but she had eventually scared off the larger beast. Unfortunately, the growling had scared off her horse, which she had forgotten to tie up, and sent the trial spiraling from bad to worse.

Valyeria had spent the trial cleaning up the mess- it was better for all involved if he simply disappeared. The farm was technically owned by the Cauldron who didn't have any use for it at the moment, so they had lent it out to her as a "gift".

Another shiver wracked her body and she stopped. This was stupid. She would find a spot to hide, wait out the storm, and continue home come morning. There was no reason she needed to get home tonight. Her feet found a small dirt path leading off the main road and she trudged along, her head bowed low.

A thunk made her stop in her tracks, her eyes glancing about. What was that?

She didn't hear anything else and narrowed her eyes in the darkness. Was that a shape? Was that a human shape?

As Valyeria went to turn around, her foot kicked a rock, sending it skittering loudly across the path. From the corner of her eye, she caught the jerk of motion as something rose suddenly. Her heart beat faster, the cold suddenly forgotten.

She slowly slunk into a crouch, thinking that if she moved slow enough, he might not notice the sudden change in shades of darkness. Half the height that a normal person would be, she walked forward in an awkward, rotating gait that let her keep her knees totally bent. She drew closer, her eyes finally picking out the shape of the man, hidden against the murky sky.

The smell of dirt hit her nostrils and she flared, her head slowly moving about to sniff- decay and rot were in the air. She gathered her muscles, ready to leap aside as she spoke.

"Who are you?"
OOC: Feel free to have Nero notice her as she creeps up if you feel like you would be able to (only competent stealth)
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Neronin
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[Farmlands] Naughty Deeds (Vluharqih)

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"Raskalarn's rump!" Neronin nearly jumped out of his dark robe as he spun around. "Bogs! You startled me." He peered up from under the hood at her. Dark patches of ink that blotted out the murky sky behind her seemed to flank both shoulders until Neronin realized they were wings. The woman's hands were long and inhuman and her face was marked with tattoos. Her exotic appearance sent his mind reeling for a moment. The mage shook himself back to reality as he realized she had just interrupted him retrieving a body from a grave.

As the rain fell between them Neronin just looked at her while searching for words to say. He didn't want to be out another corpse. Some of his ventures over the past few days had lead to fruitless nights of wet, cold, or bloody spectacles. He had meant this to be a success and the presence of a too curious stranger would not thwart that. Who the hell talked to the guy who was digging up a grave in the middle of the night in the rain? That guy was clearly one of the types you stayed away from. But here she was, confronting him. No matter. He had been confronted before.

"Who am I?" Neronin felt himself begin to laugh as he looked up at her. His pale face turned with the smile that curved his thin lips. "That's the question you're going with?" He gestured to the shovel and the grave and the rain. His muddied robes were heavy with the weight of the soil now clinging to the bottom foot of their hem. Neronin leaned against the shovel and felt anger at himself for laughing. The risk had fallen through and here was the result. He was close to discovery and all he could do was laugh at the women.

"Okay...fine." He said finally. "I'm the man who is out here digging this cadaver up for research. My uh... hobby, passion, whatever, requires human anatomy and this is how I get it done." He spread his hands as if to shrug off the crime as some sort of lame guilty pleasure. He wasn't sure how she would react to that. He wasn't even sure what she was. Neronin felt the entity within him from which all that dark, vile undead power came stir. The magic swirled as his apprehension concerning this new monstrous woman rose.

He had told her some sparse version of the truth. The Etzori watched her for a reaction while wondering what had made him do that. The situation seemed so improbable that any lie would feel just like that, a lie. If worst came to worst there was always the old tried and true reserve plan. Murder.

"Who are you? Why do you have wings?" Neronin felt himself ask after another wet moment. The significance of the silence between their exchange washed away with the pounding of the rain. It just felt like an uncomfortable distraction now. Neronin reached up and wiped a pale hand dotted with grim and mud across an equally pale forehead. His eyes shifted across her person, resting on the belt and the hands and the boots. He shifted to lean away from her against the soil on the far side of the grave, his shovel like a walking stick between them. "What the fek are you doing out here in the rain alone?"

They were alone. Neronin knew it because he had picked that specific dreary trial to do his work because he would be alone out there. If she turned out to be less that amiable it would be just the two of them. Neronin thought for a moment about attempting to open the coffin and reanimate the corpse within, if there was still anything worth animating. He had been fully ready to spend the better part of a trial rebuilding a body just to have a corpse to work on. If that was what this Fod-sack needed, then he was down the river without a paddle. The mage glanced again at the woman's claw-like hands. He didn't think he would make it to opening the coffin anyway. No matter, he had other tricks if it came to that.
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Vluharqih
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[Farmlands] Naughty Deeds (Vluharqih)

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The man's voice startled her, and she leapt to the side, rising to her feet as he spoke. "I startled you?"

The silence stretched between them as Valyeria realized what he was doing. Graverobbing. A shovel was propped against his shoulder, dirt and mud caked the hem of his cloak. His face was pale against the dark sky, though flecks of mud were speckled across the cheeks.

Valyeria raised an eyebrow as she stared at him, the laughter wholly unexpected. It seemed like something out of a story- the evil villain basking in his triumph over the hero. Save for the fact that he likely wasn't a villain, merely a poor man looking to make ends meet. And ignoring the fact that she was hardly a hero.

She stood stoically until he was finished, patiently waiting. Another eyebrow raise at his explanation- not what she had thought it would be. She held herself warily still, not sure what to make of this odd man standing alone in the rain. His next question made her frown at him- had the man never seen an Avriel before?

"I'm Avriel. You know, winged people, live in Athart, that sort of thing?" She fluttered her wings for extra emphasis, water beading off them. "Why do you need bodies? What sort of hobby is this?"

Whatever it was it likely wasn't a good one- anything legal and you could've simply paid people for the corpses of their loved ones. To be graverobbing.... well that had some dangerous implications.

Valyeria returned her gaze to the man, doing her best to make out features in the gloom. His cloak looked well made, despite the muck, and his appeared didn't strike her as that of a standard grave robber. He was far more...refined.

A thought occurred to Valyeria, though she decided to keep it to herself for the moment. She did have a problem with too many corpses- research had its side effects- and no way to get rid of them. If this man could somehow make that problem disappear, well...

"I'm supposed to be going back to Etzos, but my damned horse spooked and ran off.No way am I flying in this weather," she continued, holding up a hand to catch the rain. "I got a chill on the way back, and I wanted to find a farm to spend the night in...I don't suppose you have any extra clothing on you?"
OOC: Nero abandonded this thread
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Werewere
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Re: [Farmlands] Naughty Deeds (Vluharqih)



Review Is In!
Vluharqih
Knowledge:
Endurance: Keeping moving in the Rain
Endurance: Long treks involve persistence
Intimidation: Animals are more Bark than Bite
Neronin: Grave Robber

Loot: N/A
Injuries: N/A
Renown: N/A to short to really do anything with

Points: 15 May not be used for Magic


It always sucks when a good scene gets cut short. I did enjoy the interactions between the two people at first, that both had some fears going in. I mean, you are in a grave yard, shouldn't you be alone? Vluharqih gave a really grim view on Neronin, as the opposite was being slightly put off by a pair of wings. This thread had a lot of potential, just wish it could of been finished.


Any injures are based on a 1d100 roll using applicable skills
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word count: 137
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