The Mortalborn strode towards the noticeboard at a brisk pace, a piece of crisp white paper in his right hand. A middle-aged man - little more than a beggar judging by his plain and somewhat threadbare clothing - that was just taking a look at the numerous job offers quickly moved away, murmuring something that sounded like, “Sorry, m’lord!” and bowing slightly as he did so. The Mortalborn raised a dark eyebrow, finding it somewhat peculiar to be addressed thus when he was not of noble birth, but decided not to argue with him about it. He had already been taken for far worse things than a lord.
He was just about to pin his own message to the board – there had been an accident in one of the laboratories and some of the furnishings needed to be repaired as consequence – when something caught his eye. He furrowed his brow very lightly as he reached towards the piece of paper in question and let a gloved hand thoughtfully run across it. The finger bone of an Immortal? He checked the message again to make sure that he had not misread it or simply been imagining things, but its contents remained the same.
A certain Jaks Liteborn was looking for his grandfather’s lucky charm that happened to be the finger bone of an Immortal. He wondered about the truth of the man’s claim, how his grandfather could have acquired the finger bone and which Immortal it had once belonged to, and then he abruptly ripped the piece of paper off and put it into a pocket of his coat before anybody else could take it and get their hands on a potentially powerful object.
He did not normally accept odd jobs – he considered such things to be below him, and he did not really need what little money was being offered either - but this, he decided, merited further investigation.
Last edited by Doran on Sat Dec 03, 2016 9:29 am, edited 3 times in total. word count: 324
“I paid my taxes!” The man that opened the door to the small house in Lowtown had a panicked look on his face. He matched his home in every regard. He was utterly unremarkable, with pale skin, light blue eyes and pale blonde hair. “Amalia, where is the document?” he called to somebody inside his house, probably his wife, the Mortalborn thought, and a few trills later a brown-haired woman that was hardly five feet tall showed up, wearing an apron – apparently she had been cooking something when he had knocked – and holding a stack of papers in her hands. The man took it and rifled through it so quickly that he nearly dropped everything. A bit of sweat was beading on his forehead.
“Look, here’s the proof! We had some trouble paying because our old house was destroyed when the rebels attacked last season, but my brother in law lent us the money”, he insisted and held the document in question towards the Mortalborn with trembling hands. Doran did not touch it, but raised a gloved hand, signaling him to stop.
“I’m not a tax collector”, he informed him in a tone of voice that was a hint cool – the man’s behaviour was getting on his nerves - and removed the message he had taken from the noticeboard from his coat pocket. “I came because of this here.” He held it in front of the man for a moment so that he could take a look before he abruptly let it disappear again. “Your grandfather’s lucky charm. I have decided to offer you my help in finding it. You are Jaks Liteborn, I hope?” he asked and raised an eyebrow.
“Yes … yes, of course”, Jaks stammered. “Please … please come in.” He gestured towards the open door and then turned to his wife. “Amalia, can you make tea? We have a guest.”
---
The Mortalborn hesitated a bit before he took a seat on the couch in the couple’s living room. The shade of green of its upholstery reminded him of an acid he had experimented with the other trial and was quite an eyesore, especially in combination with the bright red curtains and the light brown carpet. Nothing in the Liteborn home seemed to match, and everything was at least several decades out of fashion.
“We lost everything”, Jaks explained apologetically as he noticed the way Doran surveyed his home. “Fortunately Amalia’s brother still had some old furniture in the attic that he gave us for free otherwise we would have to sleep on the floor now. It’s the bone. Everything was fine until we lost it.” He sighed and shook his head, took a sip from the little porcelain cup his wife had brought him and sighed again.
Doran nodded, feigning understanding and perhaps sympathy before he asked, “Whose bone was it? The message only said that it was an Immortal’s finger bone, but not whose finger bone it was.” He had other questions as well, but Mister Liteborn would likely feel overwhelmed if he posed too many at once, he decided. He did not seem to be particularly stable.
Jaks looked at him from out of his pale eyes for a moment and then informed him, “It was Ziell’s.”
“Is that so?” the Mortalborn asked somewhat mockingly and wondered what the chances were that he would meet a man that claimed to once have owned a piece of his father. One of the Immortals, he decided, seemed to be having fun at his expense, a circumstance that he showed little appreciation for. Should he call the mortal on his lie?
When he had last seen Ziell, albeit briefly, he had not appeared to be missing any body parts, and he doubted that either Jaks or his grandfather really had what it took to maim an Immortal. He looked at the man thoughtfully. What was really going on here?
The mortal seemed to have recognized something in his gaze that he did not like, for he instantly drew back a bit, raising his hands defensively as he did so. “I swear it! My late grandfather said that he got it from a wealthy man for saving his life, and my grandfather would never lie. Please, Sir, you have to help! Without the bone we won’t survive!”
Just as he had finished speaking, his wife returned from the kitchen. She placed a plate with some plain looking cake on the table before she took a seat next to Jaks. Noticing that Doran made no move to take a piece of cake, she slid the plate closer to him, nodding encouragingly.
He still did not reach for it – the cake did not look particularly appealing – but he took a few sips from his cup of tea while he wondered how he should deal with the matter at hand.
He found the two mortals that put so much faith into an object that was likely fake utterly pathetic. He had half a mind to just walk away again and leave them to their misery, but then again, there still might be more to the whole thing than was obvious. Maybe the bone was not Ziell’s, but it might still be magical in nature, however small the likelihood for that was. It was a pity that Jaks’ grandfather was not alive anymore. A mere touch could have solved the riddle then and potentially kept him from wasting his time.
“I’ll do it”, he replied somewhat reluctantly. “I need your old address though and any other information that you can give me, and I can’t make any promises that I will be able to find it.”
He had expected to just find a few broken walls and windows, maybe a few holes in the roof – mortals, he had discovered, had a tendency to exaggerate in an attempt to garner pity and attention – but it had truly been destroyed. He could not even begin to fathom how it had happened. There were only a heap of rubble and some wooden boards now where a family had once lived.
He moved around the site carefully lest what little was left of the house came crashing down or gave way under him. Mister Liteborn had said that they had grabbed their things in a hurry when they had been attacked and run out of the house. He had also said that they had usually kept the bone in a small wooden box and only taken it out when they had needed an especially great amount of luck – as if touching it would really make it more powerful!
There! For a moment he thought as if he had seen something, half buried underneath the rubble, but it was just a piece of a picture frame, containing a portrait that was obviously cheaply made. Just as he turned around again, he could hear footsteps behind him.
He reached for his sword and spun around, but it was only a thin human woman, middle aged, with stringy blonde hair and a hooked nose. “What are you doing here?” she demanded to know in a tone that was rather rude. He thought about whether he should answer when she continued, “This is my neighbour’s house. You are trespassing!”
The thinly veiled threat might have had the desired effect on a mere mortal, but it bothered him little. Besides, he was not doing anything wrong. “The Liteborns asked me to help them look for a little box containing an old lucky charm”, he informed her calmly. “You wouldn’t have seen it?” As he waited for her answer, he looked at her intently.
She was quick to answer, but avoided his gaze as she did so. “Of course not! If I had found it, I would have given it back to them!”
He was not sure if the neighbour had been entirely truthful, but there was little that could be done about it – he could not merely grab her and use his powers on her because of a mere suspicion as that would earn him a quick trip to the prison. Neither the search of the house nor the surrounding area revealed anything, and in the end he decided that it was better to give up and not waste any more time that he had already had. He would return to the Liteborns the following trial and tell them that his search had been unsuccessful, as much as that irked him as he would have loved to solve the mystery.
As he made his way back to his apartment he walked past a small shop that sold curiosities of all kinds, old books, souvenirs from trips to foreign lands, petrified animals, insects trapped in stone and ancient maps. There was one item that intrigued him especially, an account of a trip to Viden some decades before, and thus he decided to enter.
The book would provide a welcome distraction from the unsuccessful search. As he stepped across the threshold, a little bell rang above the door, and a white haired man stepped forward from behind the counter, smiling. “What can I do for you?” he asked.
The Mortalborn didn’t answer immediately, but took a look around to see if there was anything else that caught his interest. His eyes fell on a wooden box that sat on an antique table, and his heart skipped a beat. The book was quickly forgotten. “That box”, he asked and pointed at it, hoping that is interest was not too obvious as that might compel the merchant to increase the price. “Where did you get it?”
“Ah, the box”, the old man said. His smile widened. The Mortalborn realized that his mouth was nearly devoid of teeth. “A woman brought it to me just the other trial. She said that it had belonged to her grandfather. He had claimed that the item inside it was magical, but she said that she had tried to awaken its powers, but failed, so she had brought it to me to see if she would get any money for it. The box might fetch a few nels.”
“The item though”, Doran wondered. “Is it a bone? And do you still have it?” The merchant didn’t answer immediately, but furrowed his brow and finally replied, “I’m not sure what you want with it, Sir. I examined it. I’m not sure why she thought it was magical. No matter how I touched it, it didn’t do anything. I threw it into the trash can behind the shop. If a stray dog hasn’t taken it yet, it might still be there.”
The Mortalborn hesitated for a moment before reached into a pocket of his coat and removed his purse. “I’ll give you ten nels if you sell me the box and an additional five for the bone”, he decided. He didn’t think that either the mysterious seller or the merchant knew much about magic. They might have overlooked something. Fifteen nels were a small sacrifice compared to the chance to get his hands on a powerful object. He also hoped that the fact that he offered Money for the bone that the man thought useless might entice the man into digging through the trash himself. Doran had little interest in doing so.
“One more thing though”, the Mortal remarked after the merchant had retrieved the bone. It smelled vaguely of fish, he noticed, but a bit of water and a handkerchief would take care of that. “The woman that came here … was she blonde and had a hooked nose?” The man looked at him curiously before he nodded. “Yes, she was. How do you know, Sir?”
“I might have met her”, Doran replied before he bade the old man farewell. Once he had left the shop, he decided to take a look at the bone himself. Anticipation quickly made way to disappointment. He had seen human bones – he had worked as a doctor for arcs – and the bone he held in his hands didn’t look like one. It probably came from a pig or maybe a cow, he thought.
Mister Liteborn’s grandfather had apparently tricked them all, and whatever events his family had thought had only transpired due to the bone’s power would likely have happened anyway. He almost admired the man for his ingenuity. Or maybe it was just stupidity, if the story about how he had received it was true?
Either way, the neighbour had apparently dug through the ruins of the house and taken the bone, hoping to get her hands on a bit of good luck herself. And when she had realized that the bone had no magic, she had decided not to return it to its rightful owners, but decide to make as much money as she could with it.
He wondered if he should tell the Liteborns what she had done or report her to the guards, but then he decided that he didn’t care enough. It was none of his business. The woman hadn’t caused him any harm. Should he even return to the Liteborns? And if he did return to them, should he tell them that it was not an Immortal’s bone, but an animal bone?
In the end, in a sudden bout of sympathy – or maybe it was merely prudence - he decided to keep the truth to himself. There was no harm in letting the Liteborns continue to believe that they owned a magic item. Besides, if he told them the truth, that it was just a pig’s bone, he was unlikely to get the money he had invested back - or the reward.
► Show Spoiler
Doran is doing this job from the noticeboard. The reward is 40 gn, he spent 15 gn in this thread.
Jaks Liteborn: Seeking his grandfather's lucky charm.
Jaks Liteborn: Says his lucky charm is Ziell's finger bone.
Detection: Spotting small details in wreckage
Detection: Spotting eye contact is important.
Investigation: Looking for clues at the scene.
Investigation: Putting together puzzle pieces.
Loot:
Loss: 15gn, Gain: 40gn. So you're up 25gn!
Fame:
+1 (good deed, not telling them the truth), +5 (job)
Magic:
These points may NOT be used for arcana
Overview:
General comments. straightforward thread, so not masses of knowledge, but nice to see Doran doing some investigation. Story Good, you kept a nice pace and maintained a cohesive and coherent story line. Structure Lovely! You have a beautiful writing style.
