Solo First Assignment

[Belugnir]

Spring 23rd 517 AV, an hour or so past noon, in the Prairie:

It had been several weeks since that hazardous chore with the Akalak slave, and Ein was finally given a new, hopefully less traumatizing job to do, though judging by how easily his mood was souring before he even got to the site of the errand, that'll hardly be the case. His big-shot-warden boss lady stuck him with babysitting some good for nothing, freshly baked undead sorcerer's apprentice. Never did Einar take kindly to the idea of a woman bossing him around, be she a tavern wench or some High Warden, or whatever her title was, and his unkind taking to the idea only grew sourer and sourer as he watched the young Nuit's uncertain, clumsy walking pace while they made their way across the dusty plane. It was his first proper, official assignment, however, so he did have a mind to prove that he can do the job right.

The apprentice was meant to go test his master's spell in the field or some-such, Ein didn't know the details, all he knew was that he had to haul a whole lot of packed up body parts or rather 'samples' of gods-know-what creatures across the sand in a wheelbarrow. He knew not what the rotten bastards were experimenting with, he cared not for it, he just had to make sure the apprentice, whose name he didn't bother remembering, made it back in one, sentient piece. And judging by how slowly they progressed with the Nuit constantly looking around as if he saw a deathly threat in every grain of dry dirt that they were passing by, he'll have to be making sure for quite a while.

''Y'know, one of us does tend to ploughin' age, mate. So if you could, pretty please, pick up your sodding pace!'', Ein finally burst at the Nuit as they began making under twenty steps in a minute. Yes, he was frustrated enough to count them out.

The Nuit, visibly startled by the man's yell, took several moments to compose a stuttering reply ''T-they don't pay you to lecture me. So keep q-quiet! You might rouse a predator from sleep...'', vainly did the undead attempt an intimidating tone.

''I 'aven't been paid a copper yet, and if this keeps up, it won't be worth the coppers I'll be paid, so I don't give a rat's arse. If something does show up I'll be paid for killing it. Or it'll kill me, and I'll be free from the sight of you. So either you walk it up or I'll stroll off yelling my lungs out so that every godforsaken monstrosity sitting in this wasteland would know where to find and eat you. Maybe then you'll at least learn how to run proper since you can't walk worth a whore's promise.'', Ein was glad for one thing, however, and that was the fact that this one scrony bastard conveniently spoke the common tongue, so he could understand to full extent every vulgarity that came out of the man's mouth.

With a brief glare of both fear and disbelief at the man's words, the Nuit did turn back around and start walking at a faster, though now even more nervous pace, and the man was thus free to speed up his own, with a smug grimace at that. Ein was wondering why on the gods' green world would any warlock worth their salt care for an apprentice like this one. Either he had some absurd knowledge or skill when it came to their scribbling and sorcery, or he had a ton of gold to pour into someone's pockets. Or maybe the master didn't care for this apprentice at all and sent him to the Prairie in hopes that some stray monster will indeed eat him. A scoffing snort tore itself from the man at the last thought.

[Belugnir]

It wasn’t long before they reached their supposed destination. The Nuit proceeded to mutter some instructions which he hardly seemed to be confident about, Ein cared naught for the outcome, he just wanted it over with as soon as possible so he quickly did as the sack of bones asked. After unpacking the countless severed limbs and preserved carcasses of some creatures that the man knew not how to imagine nor call by name, the apprentice took some sort of inscribed staff from the wheelbarrow and began walking around the barren plane seemingly aimlessly before he nervously started to scratch at the dry land, drawing some odd symbols. Ein stood and observed him for a minute, with a gripping desire to grab the Nuit by the neck and give him a good shaking to see if the bastard even had a spine at all.

‘’Need help with that?’’, the man finally asked with a frustrated sigh, realizing that if this one keeps up his pace of scribbling, it’ll likely take until next morning before they even started on their way back to the Citadel.

‘’No. Be quiet. You don’t know any of the symbols anyway.’’, for once, the Nuit seemed concentrated and spoke without muttering like a scared chicken. And for once he had a point. Ein did know how to speak a chunk of the ancient tongue, and he did eventually come to recognize a symbol or two that the apprentice seemed to be drawing in a broad circular formation, but it will likely only take more time if the Nuit had to describe each and every thing instead of just doing it himself. And besides, the apprentice just barely knew what he was doing himself, for the most part he worked per his master's instructions. So Ein went and committed his unexpected chunk of free time to the first thick, dried branch that he found and an attempt to carve a wooden ring out of it with his old eating knife, every so often raising his head to see how far the apprentice got with his scribbling, or to gaze around the area, looking for any potential threat. The next half an hour or so was spent in silence, save for the sound of wood scratching against the ground as the Nuit worked.


‘’It’s finished.’’, the apprentice finally spoke, and Ein rose his head once again, just after placing a bright circle of wood onto his little finger. The man hopped down from his seat atop a table-sized rock, grabbed his poleaxe to leave it leaning against the wheelbarrow that they brought and speak in reply.

[Belugnir]

‘’Right, so what now?’’

‘’Now I need you to keep looking for predators while I arrange the body parts.’’

The man’s expression turned from slightly anxious and excited to utterly disappointed. With a huff, he took his poleaxe again, only to lean onto it and not collapse out of sheer dead boredom. He was beginning to hope that at least some stray crippled freak would’ve smelled the body parts they carried by now and came over to try having itself a bite, that way he’d at least get to experience that odd occurrence known as ‘happening’. Either way, another half an hour went by as the Nuit arranged the ingredients for his spell, all three hundred and some pounds of them, and went around making sure that his ten feet diameter spell circle was in order and correct. Then he finally called Ein back to his side.

‘’Please tell me you’re done with your preparations already…’’, the man almost snorted, driven to the brink of madness from idly gazing at ploughin’ nothing for near an hour.

‘’You don’t even know my name, do you?’’

‘’No. But I know I’ll have to smack something good a couple o’ times if I have to spend one more second doing fuckin’ nothing in this wasteland. And unless one of your buddies’ hellspawns doesn’t pop out of the ground in the next breath I take, that something is likely to be you.’’, after a moment, Ein decided to finally ask the fellow’s name, with a most obnoxious tone: ‘’Mister…?’’

‘’F-Feto…’’, the Nuit’s spineless character finally began to show again at the idlest of threats, he nearly bent over in cowering as the warden initiate spoke.

‘’Einar.’’, the man sliced his name into the air around them.

‘’W-well, Einar, you won’t be waiting much more, we’ll be observing the result in a moment…’’, and with that, Feto turned to the circle, apparently channeling up the spell, or however the hell this lot of nonsense of theirs went.

[Belugnir]

Moments later, a spark of light came flashing from the center of the circle, Feto went flying a couple feet backwards, landing flat on his arse, while Ein, who stood somewhat behind and to the right of the apprentice, after adjusting his eyes and removing the hand that he covered them with instinctively, finally got to gaze upon the result of the Nuit’s experiment.

Gone were the countless body parts of beasts and creatures unnamed, gone were the symbols on the ground, and instead, only a giant pile of steaming, dark brown mass remained. Both Einar and Feto looked dumbfounded at the thing, then at each other, then back to the thing. And it was then that the man burst out laughing.

‘’And thus he was dubbed ‘Feto the Shitlord’!!’’, Ein bent over, holding his stomach with a single hand, unable to stop laughing like the most enthusiastic of madmen, while the Nuit couldn’t believe neither his failure nor the attitude that his supposed bodyguard was giving him. ‘’Cheva’s tits, mate, what the fuck? This… This is what they sent me here for?’’, Einar finally stopped choking on his own laughter. ‘’A literal pile of sh—‘’, he never finished his question, as the dung-like mass beside him seemed to spring a portion of itself into an elastic limb, striking the man and sending him to fall over into the dirt, holding the side of his ribcage, gasping for air. The living heap of shit then began to slowly slither its way towards its creator, who was now stood even more dumbfounded and clueless as to what to do.

[Belugnir]

It was a moment later, when the thickest, lowest layer of the apparent creature spread itself wide, like a gaping mouth, to reveal countless bones formed like irregular lines of teeth, that the Nuit started stumbling backwards in an attempt to get out of the way, yet were one to gaze into his eye, they’d find fascination just as present as fear. The creature was slowly gaining on the clumsy apprentice, at least until the business end of a pole axe ended up burying itself half the shaft deep into the disgusting monstrosity. Ein, still struggling to regain his breath from the hit he took, had buried the weapon into the monster’s supposed rear, and as he struggled to pull the weapon out for another jab, an odd eye popped open in front of him. For a moment the monster eyed him before springing another whip-like limb out to hit him with. Yet this time the man managed to evade the hit by letting go of the weapon and jumping to the side. With the creature’s attention seemingly on him now, he quickly covered a distance of about a dozen yards and tried to force himself into a brief meditation. With his weapon slowly sinking into the heap of dung, he knew he’ll have to get his hands dirty… quite literally. And if he was to kick and swing away at this bloody thing, he might as well try packing up a punch, as this monster hardly seemed to mind having a six feet weapon shaft buried into it. The slithering mass wasn’t halfway across to him when Ein managed to grasp his Djed flow and concentrate a thin amount of excess power into his upper body. He then made his own advance, delivering a nearly thoughtless punch that sent nearly a gallon of the dark-brown mass splattering across the dirt. Twice more did he deliver such a hit, and once did he manage to evade a counter attack with one quick duck, yet before he could feel the full gladness of freely hitting away with Flux at soft sludge, never mind the smell, one of the monster’s whipping limbs swept him off his feet, and then slammed him across the belly from above, leaving the man to keel over on the ground in pain, though after a moment he did begin to creep away, as hurting as he was, he wasn’t going to just sit on his arse and let this freak eat him alive. The Djed flow was lost to him, but he did manage to out-space the creature in an almost hysterical attempt to get away from it. As chasing the beaten up man seemed to prove too much of an effort, the monster began slithering to the calmly standing Nuit again.

It seemed as if Feto had finally found some determination in him, with a mind to preserve this experiment, rather than run away from being eaten by it. He kept calm as the creature slowly covered the long distance between them, constantly trying to subdue it with magic, hypnotize it or some-such, yet Ein, beaten out of his breath twice now by a heap of dung, had succumbed to wounds of pride more than physical ones. With a hateful grunt and saliva uncontrollably leaking from his gritting teeth, Einar forced himself up, and after several struggling steps, reached for the handles of the wooden wheelbarrow that they brought the experiment ingredients in. He had to force himself to calm down for a brief while, sinking again into a shallow meditation, so that he would conjure at least a portion of his already lacking potential with Flux magic. Yet the moment he caught hold of the faintest flow of Djed within himself, he allowed let-lose anger to mix with it, and in one spiteful motion, with a groaning ‘’HEY, SHITHEAD!”, he flung the wheelbarrow at the monster at the end of a brief charge across the dusty ground. The wooden construction rammed into and almost went clean trough the slithering mass, splattering nearly half of it across the field, and partially across the Nuit apprentice, who was now utterly shocked out of his own concentration by the scene.

[Belugnir]

But Ein wasn’t done. It seemed the hit had at least crippled the monster, yet it still moved, still slithered about, splattered pieces of it even seemed to try making their way into what remained of the main ‘body’. But before the monster could reassemble itself, Einar was already holding one broken handle of the wrecked wheelbarrow in his hand, using it as a bat, letting himself lose. All trace of control over his own Djed was lost. He ran on pure spite at this point. Every curse imaginable and unimaginable tore out of him as he swung and swung away, splattering and scattering, stomping and beating the dung-heap monstrosity, completely ignoring Feto’s pleads to stop. For nearly a quarter hour he went on and on, until the bits and pieces all together stopped moving, even then he was eager to keep batting the bloody thing.

So he stood there, panting, red with anger, covered in yet steaming dung-sludge, widely open eyes darting across the splattered mass around him, waiting to stomp and beat away at the slightest movement.

‘’What have you done!?’’, Feto yelled at the man. In his deluded eyes, Einar had just ruined his chance of studying a perfectly fine new living being.

Slowly did Ein’s gaze turn towards the Nuit, unbelieving of what the idiot had just asked him.

‘’What I’ve just done? Is MY. SODDING. JOB!’’, this shout was followed by Ein relentlessly tossing the stained wooden bat in his hand at the apprentice’s feet. ‘’LOOK AT ME! Fuck. Look at you! We’re covered in shit! I almost got my ribs and spine broken twice over! You almost got eaten, shit, I ALMOST GOT EATEN! ‘What have I done?’, ’WHAT HAVE I FUCKING DONE?!’ I just fixed your goddamn fuckup is what I’ve done! ONE LESS UNGODLY ABOMINATION TO WORRY ABOUT! YOU’RE SODDING WELCOME!”, in a frenzied movement, Ein caught sight and swept his poleaxe up from the ground before starting to stomp by the Nuit.

‘’You’re able to ploughin’ TALK AND WALK right now because ONE of us is not enough of an IDIOT to stand idly gawking into a LITERAL. HEAP. OF SHIT! AND ONE THAT'S TRYING TO EAT THEM AT THAT! Tell me, do you think it'd have eaten you head first so that you can inspect it's insides briefly, or would it begin with your feet? So that we could all have savored your last moments?'', as the Nuit was briefly mute, unable to conjure up aught but an insulted, cowardly glare, Einar kept on talking.
''Please. Fuckin’ please, go, file in a complaint or some sodding horseshit along that line to your buddies at that rotten Citadel. See how seriously they take a muttering sorcerer wannabe when they find out that he turned a bunch of their investments into a living, man-eating mass of SHIT!’’

At this point the Nuit was scared out of his skin by the man’s outbreak more than the monster could ever have hoped to frighten him, unable to utter a word.

‘’See you, Feto.’’, Einar dismissed, starting to stomp his way back to the citadel, having depleted his frustrated supply of words, and the Nuit, after taking nearly half a minute to recompose himself, followed suit, unwilling to be left alone in the Prairie, and without a thing to really take with him, as the choice was between dirt, dung, and broken wood.

At this point Ein didn’t know which he’d choose out of the three, someone out there actually paying him for enduring this literal shit-show, a day long hot bath, or the hope that that disgusting monster felt pain trough every single moment of its demise.

[Languish]

Your grades have been summoned
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Belugnir

■ Intimidation +3
■ Carving +1
■ Weapon: Polearm +1
■ Acrobatics +1
■ Tactics +2
■ Endurance +1
■ Unarmed Combat +1
■ Flux +2
■ Brawling +1

Lores

Lore of Acrobatics: Ducking in Combat
Lore of Tactics: If Weapons Don't Work, Try Magic
Lore of Endurance: Succumbing to Pride, Not Damage
Lore of Sahovan Nuit: Care More About the Magic than Survival
Lore of Tactics: Let Loose the Rage
Lore of Brawling: Using Tools as Weapons

Additional Information

You may add one pinky-sized wooden ring to your inventory.

This will also count as a job thread at over 2,500 words.

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Comments:

A fantastic story, Bel. I couldn't believe that it was actually that long once I got done reading, and had to scroll back up and check. Belugnir is so amusing, and I love the way you describe everything through his eyes, yet manage to make it understandable for the reader.

As more of a personal preference than anything, I would like to see less use of caps-lock as anger, and perhaps underlining, size, or color change for emphasis instead. Caps-lock is a bit distracting for me, and it takes away a bit of the immersion when my eyes keep jumping around the sentence. It also felt like the yelling went on for a little while (which I understand since he did almost die), but you may want to take into consideration the attention span of the reader to plow through all the repetitive "ohmygods" stuff.

Don't forget to delete your post in the grading queue. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to PM me about your grade.

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