Solo The Black Code

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This lazy agricultural settlement rests on the swampy shores of the Middle Suvan at the delta of The Kenash River. The River's slow moving bayou waters have bred a different sort of people - rugged, cultured, and somewhat violent. Sprawling plantations of tobacco and cotton grow on the outskirts of the swamp in the rich Cyphrus soils, while the city itself curls around the bayou and spawns decadence and sins of all sorts. Life is slower in Kenash, but the lack of pace is made up for in the excesses of food and flesh in a city where drinking, debauchery, gambling, slavery, and overbearing plantation families dominate the landscape.

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The Black Code

Postby Konrad Venger on September 4th, 2016, 6:15 pm

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9th Day of Fall, 516AV || Whiplash Plantation, East of Kenash


The slave didn't know how he'd managed to last the night. He knew it was no sign of favor, of that he was sure. Under a canopy of beautiful stars, wonderful and eternal, he had spend bells wrapped in terror. No sleep came to him, for he dared none. All he had to do was let his head nod for a moment to his chin, let his legs go slack under him, and the vision of jackals and vultures and lizards gnawing at his snoring form would slap him around the face and-

Metallus would wake, after barely a moment. A moment in the world and a whole night of terror in his mind. Blink at the stars, at the sky that worked ebon to jasmine to pale and paling with each breath. Feel his heart shudder and tremble in every vein, fit to rattle the chains binding his wrists and ankles.

He wanted to die. It would have been the smart thing to do. Nothing would save him. Three attempts at escape, and the lash and branding iron and the tiny metal sweat box hadn't been enough to break him. The fourth time... well...

There was never a fifth.

He wanted to die, but his soul would not allow it. He wanted to bow his head and let sleep and terror claim him until his lungs didn't breath and his heart wouldn't pump. He wanted so badly for this to end, for all of it, his whole wasted life... but at the edge of the cliff, the raw and primal part of his being would not let him. Every tick he breathed was life, was hope, was-

Metallus sighed into the moist morning air. Gods, he was so dry. Not just thirsty or hot, but dried, like he'd been smoked over a fire. All afternoon and evening in the unrelenting gaze of Syna, with no draught to quench himself. He wondered if that was the point of this simple punishment: that we would simply die of thirst and exposure. Chained up and left to expire, then beyond that, rot away until his bleached bones finally slipped their bones and were carried away by the scavengers along with the meat in their bellies. No tombstone for him save the pole they'd chained him to.

Bare feet crunched softly on soil and gravel. Low voices. Murmurs. Even the hint of slave songs, old as the city itself, raising from a hushed spatter of accents. Metallus squinted and licked lips like sandpaper. All he could see were shambling blobs between the bruising purple that was everywhere else in the field. Black and white and pink and tanned and all of them coming with the clank of chains.

The bark of orders. The hiss and bark of whips and chains. Hooves clopping across the ground as the overseers circled and strutted down the ranks of indigo and glowered at their charges.

The doomed human felt his head slump again. No. A slow death was not their intent, or at least, not the prime concern. They could have whipped him to death yesterday before all and sundry and been done with it. No... they wanted something worse for him. That he not only die but die among his friends, men and women and children he had laughed and ate and sang and cried and loved with. He could feel them moving around him. Disturbing the shrubs of indigo. Unfurling sacks to collect the precious plant.

He murmured. Water. Barely even a word, but made plain as a scream by his condition. Water, please, just a dram. A taste. Anything... but no-one listened. No-one looked. He was already a ghost in that fiend and fury gave him legs again, rose him up that he would die like this, doomed by bastards and ignored by cretins and no, no he would scream out his last breaths even if it-

THUNK!

Something fast as a whistle on the breeze slammed into the pole above his head and immediately Metallus ducked... or didn't, thanks to the chains. All defiance fled, all rage was squashed and snuffed in a moment when he saw someone stand at the edge of the field. It rose from the purple rows like a monster from a demented sea, broad-brimmed hat making his head to wide and tall like a hammerhead shark.

"Shyke."

The voice carried, even across the hundred feet or so of chirping insects and sweating slaves. Mayhap it wasn't the voice itself, but the nature of it. So casual, despite its disappointment... because it was disappointed, and nothing more. The fact he was shooting at a man, naked and terrified and chained to a pole, meant nothing to the bearer of that voice. He was just upset about his shot.

Metallus' vision swam, even through the fear that madde it sharp. It wavered so it looked like the tall man had taken off his head and was fanning his stump with it... no, that was his hat. It must have been.

Creaking wood. Straining strings. He dared to glance up, strain his eyes upward so they burned in his sockets. He looked at the crossbow bolt and then back at the man who had that heavy contraption in his hands now, yanking back on the string with both hands... sliding a fresh bolt into the groove...

The scarred man. He knew him now. That hat and that voice, like steel dragged through gravel. The one who smoked that same Swamp Vision tobacco he could smell wafting over to him, smoldering in the man's pipe at that moment.

Venger. They called him Venger.

"Out of practice," the man himself mumbled as he shouldered the crossbow and aimed the top of the bolt at the slave's bicep. "Bloody pathetic..."
Last edited by Konrad Venger on September 6th, 2016, 5:09 am, edited 1 time in total.

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The Black Code

Postby Konrad Venger on September 6th, 2016, 1:33 am

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"We must keep to our code, Venger. Without it, the animals will overrun us."

They liked to bang on about that, Konrad had discovered. The Dynasts. He'd heard it mentioned a few times, this precious "Code" of theirs, though by their telling it was a thing more understood than learned. Every Dynasty seemed to have a different understanding of it, but it all boiled down to the same thing:

Keep the slaves placid and in their place. When they're not, take steps to ensure they are.

Morai quaffed a little more of his ale and dabbed at the foam clinging to his white beard. He was good at quaffing. The word seemed made for someone of that age and bearing. He didn't just sip or chug or even knock back his drink; he savored it, smacked his lips, enjoyed the flavor like any old man who didn't really know if he'd live to have another one.

Konrad sipped, and it was water. Petching heat. Thick and moist like a succession of boiling towels forever pressed to him, soaking his clothes... gods, he was going through two shirts a day, sometimes. Sat out on one of the porches of Whiplash's main house, even the shade didn't help much.

SMACK!

Didn't distract the bugs, either. Old Man Radacke seemed to suffer them in silence, like an old bull tamely batting a hand every chime or so, but otherwise equipped with skin leathery enough for them not to be a concern. A slave sat cross-legged in one corner, endlessly pulling back and forth on a rope that led to the fan wafting cool (or at least not-as-hot) air over them.

Radacke sat. Konrad leaned. Another important distinction.

He didn't need to ask why he'd been summoned. He could hear the muffled cries and curses from the scrum of men out in the baking rays of Syna. A slave dragged back from the swamps, battered and bleeding, now kicked around while overseers and workers and guards and Dynasts and fellow slaves milled around or went about their work.

Konrad noticed the slaves didn't dare look at him. An ember of concern, a glimmer of sympathy, and they'd be right down in the dust with him, suffering hob-nailed boots and fists and leather whips. They scuttled on with their eyes fixed on their feet, lips pressed together.

Look down, look down, don't look 'em in the eye...

The Sunberthian frowned and tried to remember where he'd heard that. Sounded like the perfect song for a slave.

"Some effort, lad, for the gods' sake!" At Morai's growl the waft became a gust, every tick or so, and the old man shook his bushy face and bushy beard and rolled eyes still sharp as the kopis Konrad carried. "Bloody inefficient, if you ask me. I'm working on some other means. Some... mechanism, I'd think. Oh, slaves are a fine tool for so much, but if you can do away with them, hmm?"

Konrad just nodded. Dynasts liked to talk. They talked and they preened and they crowed and the world was their stage. Being born into power and coin gave them that outlook. But when the subject was slaves, Ruros' Sodding Shykestains, best get comfortable.

"Five attempts." Mica Radacke's grand-sire snorted in disgust and quaffed some more. He held the cup out languidly and a ready slave-girl filled it again. "A disgrace. This day should have come after the third. Back in my day we made sure we broke our chattel properly. We didn't need to waste time and resources on this nonsense. But instead, we have this..."

He waved an irritated hand that took in the squalid scene; that which was sure to be Konrad's business shortly. The old man wasn't happy, and not just because of the new generation's slacking. Konrad understood that Morai was rarely roused from his endless clanging and planning and tinkering in his workshop. But Mica was away, Jahk was on the hunt for Rujaro and Risa... well... that sweet thing didn't do well in this sort of environment.

"Order must be maintained, Venger. The Code must be enforced, and after four attempts, I want a damn example made of this ungrateful bastard." An old man. A tinkerer. A dreamer. A slaver. A Dynast. Konrad looked in that affable face and saw a familiar feral indignation there. "A warning to the rest, as public as you like. We won't be taking this into town, but our chattel will damn well know the cost of continued defiance. When they've learned their place-"

He held out his arm. A slave filled his cup. Another fanned his brow. They were looking down.

"-we can all be happy again, hmm?"

CRUNCH!

Metallus shrieked into the clean, soft morning air and a smile tugged at the unblemished side of Konrad's face. Not rushing, that was the key. He'd tugged on the trigger last time and his shot jumped up like a startled moggy. Not so the second bolt. He controlled his breathing. Exhaled as he aimed, and... squeezed.

The slave screamed again as the bolt impaling his bicep scraped and gouged against him as he squirmed. Pleas in Common and some other tongue were ripping forth from his lips now, and Konrad listened idly to them as he stuck his boot into the stirrup and pulled the string back to the latch. Once it clicked he leaned his head down... and clicked his teeth around the stem of his smoldering pipe.

Swamp Vision. The purple danced and pulsed in his eyes for a moment as he inhaled, and he washed it down with some spiced water. Ale was not a wise idea in this heat, and the early bell would not denote softer weather.

"A'right," he muttered, puffing gently for a moment and studying the wretched thing chained to the post, now sobbing and drooling as blood flooded from his arm. "Couple more... nah... do it right, lad... one fer each limb."

Konrad liked how the bolt slid into its groove so well. Expected, of course, because that was how it was built, but the neatness of it... he liked that. Everything in its proper place. After a season of listlessness, he appreciated some sort of routine, even if it was in this sweat-riddled shithole.

Shithole that's paying your bills, though, he reminded himself as he aimed at Metallus, now praying for aid to uncaring gods. And better that you'd make back home. So, you get a job, you do the job-

"-right."

He pulled the trigger and bollocks, yeah, that was the problem. He tugged the bloody thing again and instead of the thigh the bolt jerked up and pierced the slave's leg above the knee. A scarlet arc spat out from the hole and it kept spurting, kept flowing and Konrad cursed softly.

"Sodding artery."

He cursed more, venomously and creatively and directed at himself. His boot slid back into the stirrup and he allowed himself only one more shot, and much more practice with the crossbow.

Metallus wasn't due to die just yet. That wasn't the plan; wasn't his plan.

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Note: As of Fall 517AV, Konrad is known only as "Hansel" in Endrykas
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Konrad Venger
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The Black Code

Postby Konrad Venger on September 6th, 2016, 7:06 am

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There were the usual suggestions, become usual after a season of Konrad observing them. Whipping. Scourging. Flaying. Various digits and precious morsels of flesh lopped off and left to rot in the dust. Half-drowning and slow death through macabre manifestations of metal locked into place on the doomed soul.

Konrad sighed as the overseers ran through most of them, all staring over the panting figure of Metallus. The man himself packed his pipe and pondered. He waited until the slave managed to crack one swollen eye open and look up.

The talking died when the flame appeared. Out of Konrad's finger.

The overseers babble paused as they saw the mage - or so they assumed - work his djed. It was a simple enough trick. Konrad had only to focus for a few ticks, draw his djed into a gassy green tendril out of the tip of his finger. One thought did for that; another came out as a whisper, a single word.

"Fire."

With the word, the thing came to be. Green gas turned to flickering light and Konrad held it to the packed bowl until a merry chery was burning within. He sucked a few times, feeding the new flame until smoke was twisting from his mouth and he closed his eyes.

A good smoke in Syna. What more foolish thing to add to the heat of day than even more of it in your mouth?

"So... wod'uh we doin' with 'im?"

Konrad dusted off his creative gears and pondered further. The Code, the Code, the blasted Code... that loomed over his task. Not just punishment or even execution, those were hardly things new to him. But setting an example, and one that would last. More than that, an example to the other hundred-and-score "chattel" on the plantation, subdued but still bubbling with resentment.

They've seen it before. That's the problem. Whips and hanging and bludgeons. Nothing new to them.

So give them something new.


"Take 'im up to the big field," he said with some authority, temporary though it was. Konrad held no power of those men, but in this enterprise, handed to him by Old Man Radacke himself, he did hold sway. "Stake 'im to the pole there."

"Gonna end 'im while they're plantin'?"
One of them men drew his bushy brows together and squinted with piggy eyes. "Bit late inna day fer that, innit? Most of 'em are headin' back to their barracks, won't be anyone t-"

"Ain't doin' it t'day."
Steel crept into Venger's voice. The weight and keenness of command. "Chain 'im t'the pole an' leave 'im the night. Come the dawn an' the first shift comin' to the fields, I'll deal with i'm."

Again there was pause in the courtyard and Konrad felt an ire bubble in him. Did he really need to repeat himself so often? Another voice now, from a stolid-looking fellow with beefy hands and dull eyes.

"All night? He might not last it. Anythin' could happen to him out there."

"Nah. Bastard broke free, what, four times now?"
Metallus looked up and found a broken-toothed, yellow leer menacing down at him. "Little shyke's tough. Let the night make 'im tender for the morn. Then I'll finish 'im." Another puff on his pipe. A cloud of crackling Swamp Vision wafting between the knot of men over the bleeding thing at their feet. "Might wanna stop by for that..."

Aye, and how's that playing off now?

Mayhap if he'd done the deed that night, without the exposure and thirst battering down Metallus even more, Konrad wouldn't have to worry about him bleeding out so quickly. He thought on that for a moment as he lined up his final shot, and then decided it wouldn't matter.

He had experience enough with how long a man could take do die, in a hundred different ways. He'd still have time.

Easy... careful... patient... and squeeze-

CRUNCH

Oh, Metallus was not a corpse quite yet: his shriek of agony proved that much. The crossbow bolt skewered him through his untouched forearm, that and the other in his bicep holding him up with torturous efficiency. His legs were not his own anymore, weakening and broken and bleeding out, but it didn't matter.

He prayed to the gods of his father and mother. Not for deliverance, but for an end. The only defiance he had left was to cut short the pleasure of the monster tormenting him; that he might die quickly, before anymore enjoyment could be wrung from him.

Konrad put down his crossbow and started walking. Syna had risen enough to light every scrap of soil and indigo and flesh around him now. Night was banished and the slaves were already sweating in streams, leaving darkened trails on the mud as they worked. Some dared look up as the figure wrapped in black and evil intent marched forwards... with his arms spread...

Come.

Konrad did not see the men from yesterday arrive. Two of them, anyway. The other two had decided to sleep in until their labors began, but Piggy and Stolid were curious. They sauntered up the path to the big field, where the choice indigo was planted, and saw that Sunberth sod Venger start to close on-

"Bloody hells," Piggy said with a wince, taking in the pincushion Metallus had become. "Bastard wasn't kidding was he?"

Come.

Stolid was about to speak when he saw the wyrd. A green gas, creeping and rising off Konrad's hand like morning dew from the ground. As they watched, as he walked, the gas grew from a shimmer into a cloud forming in front of him. A handful of slaves had slowed their labors, watching in sickened fascination as the Scarred One closed on a moaning, sobbing Metallus.

From under his hat, Konrad glanced left and right... and smiled.

Aye. Pay attention.

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Note: As of Fall 517AV, Konrad is known only as "Hansel" in Endrykas
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Konrad Venger
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The Black Code

Postby Konrad Venger on September 6th, 2016, 8:06 am

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He couldn't feel it anymore. Whatever capacity Metallus had for pain, he was sure he'd long left it behind. Like a jar filling with water, he'd drunk deep of agony and now the excess was spilling over the lip, useless and beyond his ken. He knew he was skewered in two... no, three places. He couldn't feel anything below his waist.

He was above himself. His self. His body, below him and yet he clung to it, a thread of the mind or the soul keeping him clawing to the world at large.

Metallus smiled through the blood and bile. His end was close. His suffered was nearly at an end. Then he looked up... and realized with a rush of piss that he still had the worst to endure.

The Scarred One was upon him. Some Sunberthian, or so he'd heard. A mercenary monster that had come in on a slave caravan two seasons before, and quickly signed on with the Radacke. Metallus had heard snippets about the Dynasties. They were all grasping, oppressing bastards to his mind, but he figured even among those families that built their wealth on the blood of others, even among them the Radacke were scorned. So it said much to him, the kind of man who would take their coin.

The Spring had proven him right. The Scarred One with the name he could not remember - gods, must I not even know the name of my killer? Is that blessing or curse? - had a gift for pain. Most times he was a guard, patrolling along with the rest, but other times...

Metallus should have known, when he slipped out from the barracks four night ago, that eventually, and finally, it would be his ruined face he saw at the end.

"K... Kih... Kill..."

"Aye."


There was green. Just the color. Not attached to man or beast or tree or weather, but a cloud of it suddenly bullied its way into his eyes. It seemed that this man had pulled down an evil bank of the stuff from the sky and now he was pushing it towards him.

Konrad's face was a pinched mask as he willed the djed to cover the slave's face. He started babbling and begging again, chewed tongue finding some voice now but all words stifled and choked by the thick slime seeping its way into him. The mercenary stopped a few feet from the impaled slave.

Deeper. Deeper.

He was fresh from a full night's sleep. His djed was strong, flowing within him and just waiting to be tapped. Ta[ it he did, drawing it out from the ritual scars on his palms and pushing it into the slave. Violating what little of him was left, pouring gassy, dripping djed into his mouth, nostrils, eyes, ears, any pore or opening that could be accessed.

Once the slave's head was a mass of squirming green, once his eyes were wide and bugging in horror, once the slaves were watching like horrified statues... Konrad stopping pushing... held up a hand...

Burn.

SNAP

A snap of his fingers and the djed burst into furious, flaming life. Metallus' dying scream was his loudest, even as his tongue and throat was scorched away within ticks. He strained impossibly against the chains with his crippled limbs. The old beam creaked and rattled as his hair was incinerated, his eyes burned to jelly, his skin sloughed off in sizzling rivulets of fat and blacked crust.

The slaves gasped as one. Bundles of indigo were dropped. A woman screamed. Konrad ground his teeth as the effort of his magecraft pounded through his arms and his skull, paying him back in pain for his hideous ability. When he smiled with his teeth clamped together, he looked more wolf than man, drinking in the horror around him.

Aye. They'll remember this.

"Any man runs from this place," he said as he strode away, pausing only to reclaim his pipe and crossbow. "Ned not fear a whippin' or a brand. From now on, the Code ends with me..."

He stopped. He turned. He pointed at the blackened, smoking skull hanging from a ruined body, the whole ravaged mess slumped over from red-hot chains until everything rotted away.

"And this."

He walked away with Swamp Vision filling his lungs and the bow over his shoulder. Piggy and Stolid had picked up their jaws and shuffled out of his path as he walked. He met their eyes under the darkened brim of his hat, and touched the brim of it as he went.

||Common||Thoughts||Pavi||Fratava||Myrian||Other's Speaking||
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Note: As of Fall 517AV, Konrad is known only as "Hansel" in Endrykas
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Konrad Venger
Long is The Way and Hard
 
Posts: 923
Words: 1060755
Joined roleplay: November 23rd, 2015, 4:05 pm
Location: Endrykas
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The Black Code

Postby J'Ak on August 20th, 2017, 2:11 pm

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G R A D E



xp

Weapon: Crossbow +2
Reimancy +2
Leadership +1
Torture +2
Rhetoric +1


lores

Kenash: Whiplash Plantation
Slavery: The Black Code
Archery, Crossbow: Reloading
Archery, Crossbow: Aim & squeeze the trigger while exhaling
Medicine: Cut arteries bleed out in chimes if not treated immediately
Torture: All the techniques a macabre imagination can conjure!



  
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