Veteran Bracket Finals: Sumnner v Bloodrose

[Visla Eraclaire]

The round will end in two weeks time, Thursday, November 19th at 11:59 PM. Enjoy the extra hours due to late posting of this thread.

Good luck!

[Sumnner]

He had survive again. He didn't remember what had happened at the docks, or what had happened leading up to what had happened at the docks, but more and more he felt a sinking feeling that it hadn't been good, whatever it was. He had awoken to the sounds of yelling men, neighing horses, braying oxen, and a great blending of every sort of sound known to man, all louder than naturally intended. His head felt like it had been squeezed through a vice, stomped on by ten dock workers, dragged against the grain on a splinter infested board and then smacked just for good measure. He groaned loudly as he cradled his head in his hands, legs stretched out in front of him like a child of four and slowly rocked himself back and forth.

He continued the motion for a few minutes, gathering his wits and slowly trying to stamp out the pressing pain in his skull. Unable to accomplish the task he instead settled for a loud, long sigh and dropped his hands into his lap. Almost immediately he was blinded by a ray of bright, yellow sunlight streaming in through a small window up above him and he winced painfully as he pulled back. He was going to have a long day.

Blinking at the residue that had been burned into his cornea, he stood on shaky legs and cast about him for his belongings. He found them, after a few moments of frantic searching, stuffed tightly beneath a heap of woolen blankets and jute sacks. He inspected them quickly and after finding nothing wrong with them, shouldered them and pushed his way out of the small room he had been occupying. He blinked as the world exploded with light around him and after a few moments, was able to see clearly enough to make out that he was standing on a pier.

A strange feeling of familiarity at the sight tickled the back of his mind but the thought vanished behind the cloud of pain and general fuzziness of temporary memory loss, and recent wakefulness. He shook his head again, trying to clear the last remnants of the haze, and after only succeeding in increasing his headache, abandoned the motion. He let his gaze drift and after a moment, found a way off of his tiny island of solitude and turned to exploit it.

The sounds of life bursting at the seams filled his ears as he pressed his aching body into it, and despite his inability to concentrate on any thing for very long, the feeling of familiarity refused to disappear completely. He had been in this place before, he just couldn't place the when, or the how, or even the why.

He felt himself begin to worry as he was swallowed whole by the teeming life of the docks.

[Bloodrose]

"Look, I've got the gold to make it worth your while." The mercenary tried to explain calmly, his tone civil even as he felt his temper rising. "All I'm asking for is passage off this lousy island."

The poor sod Teric was haranguing was a younger man, respectively, in his early to mid-thirties. He was a pretty unassuming fellow, dressed plainly in cheap breeches and a flannel shirt - the tops of his red suspenders hidden under a massive, bushy beard that put the Grandmaster's own chin-whiskers to shame. The two men were of comparable height and build, but whereas Teric's hands toyed absently with the hilt of his sword, the boat captain's hands worked busily to coil a lead-line fastened to the prow of his small fishing vessel, the Servant.

"How many different ways can I tell you this, old timer? I don't charter out my boat to passengers." The captain emphasized for the third time. "You wanna get out of Scara Brae, you can wait for the ferry to Corone like everyone else."

Teric took a deep breath and closed his eyes for a second as the fisherman tossed the coiled rope in his hands onto the Servant's deck and went to work on another mooring line. In the veteran's opinion, the fisherman was being completely unreasonable. It wasn't like Corone was a very long journey by boat - especially when one was offered considerable compensation.

"Two hundred marks." Teric offered generously, his voice dangerous despite his best efforts to keep his temper in check.

"Seems like you don't listen very well." The captain retorted; anger of his own evident in his tone. "Maybe you’re going deaf in your old age, but I've said it three times and I won't say it again after this: I ain't fucking taking you to Corone." The captain jabbed a meaningful finger in the old veteran's face, the mooring line momentarily forgotten. Teric had to try very hard to keep from breaking that finger off.

"Be reasonab..."

"Fuck you." The captain interrupted as Teric half-heartedly attempted an appeal to decency. "I don't know why you want out of the Brae so badly, and frankly, I don't want to know. I don't take passengers because I won't end up gutted by some criminal that doesn't want to pay his fare once I smuggle his ass halfway to Corone. No amount of money you can offer me is going to change my mind, so shove off before I get the harbormaster over here."

The mere mention of the harbormaster squashed any will Teric had left to argue with the man over whether or not he'd ferry him to Corone. Not because the mercenary was a wanted criminal, as the fisherman seemed glad to assume he was, but because the old warrior had little patience to stand around and sort out his identity with the lame-brained port authorities. Likewise, Teric resisted the urge to get one last word in with the fisherman; that 'word' of course being a fist to the jaw.

I just want out of this backwater excuse for a country. The mercenary stewed in his anger as the fisherman finished coiling up his lines and departed. As midday approached, more and more people had begun to congregate at the docks - Scara Brae's only real center of commerce. Tradesmen, merchants, sailors, and everyday commoners milled about like one great hive of human activity, and the general din of their collective voices, footsteps, and other actions frayed on Teric's already fried nerves. He'd had it out with the monks at the Pagoda earlier this same morning - voicing angrily his suspicions that they were holding back challengers and pay because they wanted rid of him.

Well they'll be rid of me. Was the thought that slipped through Teric's mind as he turned from the mooring slip where the Servant had been tied up. They'll be rid of me as soon as I can find a boat off this fucking island.

"Get the fuck out of my way." Teric snarled at a couple of hapless bystanders as he plowed through them. He wasn't in the mood to go about politely ask the throng of people at the docks to step out of his way; he simple pushed through them. A couple of dockworkers - the typical rough types one found at any harbor - gave the mercenary a dirty look or two as he jostled by them, but most people were content to simply be shoved out of the way and go about their business.

[Sumnner]

He was stuck. Caught in the middle of a teeming mass of bodies covered in sweat, grit, mud and blood. The press of the crowd was almost enough to suffocate him, but his above average height granted him at least a little respite, if it was only in the form of not having his nose pressed into the necks or backs of those around him. The air was, fresher, where his nose was, and coupled with his increasingly painful headache, he was grateful for the respite. The feeling didn't last long however, as the increasing pressure from the crowd around him ground away at his nerves, spiking his headache to new levels.

He grunted softly as someone pushed their way ahead of him and he resisted the urge to snap at them; his headache must have been significant if he was being reduced to having to think about controlling his temper. He had always prided himself with having a slow burning temper, at least, he thought he had always prided himself with that trait. His head was still very fuzzy for some reason, pulling up memories of his past before he had woken up in this strange place still being as hard as ever. He grimaced faintly as the thought crossed his mind and rubbed his temples slowly, trying to alleviate the pain building there.

It didn't work and after a few moments he abandoned the motion, instead settling his nerves by hiking up his violin case and jamming his free hand into his pocket. Something brushed his fingers as his hand hit the bottom lining but before he investigate whatever it was, someone shouted just off to his right. He didn't catch what was said, but it was the only warning he would receive before his world once again exploded to pieces around him.

A tall man, perhaps a few inches taller than he, perhaps less, with more gray in his hair than naught, was barreling his way through the crowd, pushing and shoving a path clear, toward the area where he was standing and in that moment after hearing the shout and seeing the man, he knew he had no time to avoid a collision. He tensed, squeezing his eyes shut, preparing for the impending shove. He still grunted in surprise when the old, calloused hands gripped his shirt and yanked him out of the way, but it was over quickly and he was relatively unharmed by the encounter. He was just about to breathe a sigh of relief when something tugged at his violin case's strap.

The sigh became a gasp of horror as his eyes flickered down the strap, even as his body leaned backward in response to the tug, and saw that it had caught itself on the old mans sword hilt. No! He screamed in his head, but it was already too late to free it from the sword hilt, as his body was now leaning to far backward for him to compensate properly. He wheezed loudly as his body pitched itself over, the hand holding his violin case's strap darting out of its own accord to try and free its snagged portion from the sword hilt, and he fell to the ground with a wind expelling grunt.

[Bloodrose]

Teric was making good time through the crowd when something tugged at his belt. The mercenary's first instinct was to grab for his weapon, figuring some unlucky thief had just made the worst decision of his life, but his hand didn't touch leather-wrapped metal as expected. Instead the veteran glanced down to find some sort of strap caught in the basket-hilt at his hip, and before he could even think of untangling himself, the damage had already been done.

A lithe looking fellow with dirty blonde hair fell unceremoniously to the ground, and the strap still attached to the warrior's hilt yanked hard on Teric as he went. Were he a weaker man, or had he been caught more off balance, the veteran likely would have fallen himself, but he managed to catch himself before biting the cobblestones. The side-effect, unfortunately, was that the buckle on Teric's belt gave way under the unexpected strain. Now normally the mercenary would have felt bad for the young man, since it wasn't exactly his fault for getting roped up in the jostling throng of human activity. Given the general nature of his day thus far, however, Teric wasn't exactly in a sympathetic mood.

"The Mother curse your stupid ass!" Teric rounded on the youngster with all the malice and spite of a crotchety old man. The sellsword was holding both ends of his now broken belt at the front of his pants, surveying the damage while in the same motion holding up his breeches. The mercenary's sword hung loosely at his hip, and if not for the act of holding up his pants, Teric might have had half a mind to use the razor-edged blade. "What kind of simpleton carries something with a loose strap through a crowd like this?"

Teric reason for berating the younger man was perhaps dubious at best, but the irked mercenary didn't care. He was more concerned about his belt - Just one more thing going wrong today. - and he was damned if the clumsy oaf with the strap-bearing case was going to get away without hearing about it.

"Well, whadaya got to say for yourself?" Teric barked, aiming an opportunistic kick for the man's ribs while he was down.

[Sumnner]

"What do I have to say for myself?" He whispered, too softly to be heard even a few inches from his face. "What do I have to say for myself?" He asked a second time, a little louder, but still to soft to be heard over the din of the crowd. Who, by this time, had back a little distance away from the two men, murmurs and shouts from people further back, asking what was happening, filling the air. He pushed himself slowly to his hands and knees, and then just as slowly to his feet.

"What do I have to say, for myself?!" This time it came out much louder, with each stressed word reaching more towards a shout than anything else. "Maybe if you hadn't been barging your way through this sea of humanity like a bat out of hell, none of this would have happened old man!" He couldn't say at all where his anger was coming from, only that it was there when it should not have been, burning hot within his breast and slowly building as the situation began to unfold in his head.

He was right, he believed, in that if the old man had just moved with the flow of people around him, none of what had just happened would not have happened. He heard a few mutterings of agreement from the people around him, but for the most part those closest to the pair had fallen silent. A few more began to push their way quickly deeper into the crowd, perhaps sensing that a fight was going to ensue. Which, in all likelihood, it very well might end that way.

He distantly thought that perhaps that should have scared him too, and that he too, should be beating a rapid retreat deeper into the safety of the tightly compressed sea of bodies around them. For some reason however, the thought was fleeting, more so than almost all of his others, as if he didn't want to back down, didn't want to run from this. It was strange, but even that feeling quickly fled, fuel for the fire burning in his heart at being called to blame for an act that could have easily been prevented if the old man had taken his damn time.

"A broken belt buckle is a small price to pay for the countless injuries you may or may not have incurred barreling through a packed area such as this!" He spat, his mouth curling back into a small snarl. "I say that you had it coming, and that it's rightly deserved. Now do yourself a favor and press on old man, because wasting your time bitching about a broken piece of metal is hardly worth the time and effort for one of your advanced age." He smiled nastily and hiking up his violin case, looked the old man up and down, chuckled and turned toward the hushed crowd to his immediate left.

He moved toward it, gesturing slightly to request permission to be allowed entry into the press once more. "Pardon me," he said quietly as he placed a hand on the shoulder of a stout man, applying slight pressure to help him move out of the way.

[Bloodrose]

Old man? Teric snorted derisively. Almost absently, the mercenary's hands began working to tie together the broken ends of his belt, securing his breeches. If I had a gold mark for every person who used that as an insult, I'd be the King of Salvar by now.

One look at his grey hair and beard, and every scrappy, snot-nosed miscreant south of Berevar figured they could get away with anything. 'He's just a feeble old man' was the typical line of reasoning that Teric could almost hear leaking out of their ears. 'He won't start any trouble, and if he does, I'll just push him over and try not to break his hip.'

That was the trouble with young people today: their youthful self-assuredness often caused them to fly in the face of common sense. Despite his aged and weathered countenance, one needn't be a scholar to notice that Teric didn't exactly shuffle around with a cane, nor was he hunched over under the weight of his years. With a straight back, broad shoulders, and solid muscle mass, the veteran cut a more imposing figure than most men half his age. Say nothing of the fact that his every step jingled with the soft metallic ring of chainmail, or that his sword obviously wasn't some cheese-knife carried around for show.

"So it's a lot of bold words and no balls, is it?" Teric called after the misfortunate subject of his attention. The young man was trying to escape into the crowd like a hare goes to ground when the dogs are loose, but the human mass was crowded in to tightly around them. In a way, Teric was momentarily transported back to his school boy days, this current situation an eerie parallel to childhood fights in the meal hall. Crowds had an uncanny, almost preternatural ability to sense that a fight was going to break out, and the natural response was to isolate and effectively trap the would-be combatants inside a ring of eagerly attentive eyes. "Do you honestly believe that I'm going to be cowed by the pathetic mewling of some whelp?"

Teric stalked the young man from across the open space in their malleable ring of onlookers, his gaze focused on the boy's back as he tried to leave. "Mayhap it's time someone taught you how to better respect your elders, boy."

[Sumnner]

He pushed a little harder, his face twisting slightly in frustration. "Excuse me," he said a second time, staring into the frantic eyes of a wide eyed dock worker. The startled eyes locked with his and then narrowed, anger flashing briefly within them. What happened next was a whirlwind in his minds eye, but looking back he realized he should have expected as much.

Two sets of callused hands, one black as coal, the other pale as a waxing moon, reached out to grip his shoulders and push him back away from the crowd. A chorus of voices followed the hands, words blending together into an almost incomprehensible mulch, but all saying the same thing. "You runnin' away boy?" "Running he is, the sissy!" "Stand and fight, you set yourself up!" "Fight!" "Kick his ass!" "I've got ten gold pieces says he cries at the first punch!" "Fifty!" "Seventy-five!" "Running home to mommy boy?" "Run home boy!" Laughter followed almost every single one of the cries and soon the entire crowd was laughing with them, leaving him standing at the fringes of a quickly forming circle, his hand still upraised in the motion of leaving, head slowly sinking to his chest.

You've done it now haven't you? The question slithered across his conscious, disappearing into the haze of his thoughts and he felt a stab of guilt. He had set himself up for a fight, and now he was trying to run. Guilt quickly evolved into shame and he looked up into the hungry eyes of the crowd milling about in front of him. Hungry for blood, eager for the combat about to begin. Humanity is a sick creature, he thought sadly to himself as his hands dropped back to his sides. The shouts in the crowd began to grow in earnest, chants forming, bets beginning to exchange hands. His eyes became unfocused as he slowly turned around and a lost look washed his face clean of emotion. He heard himself gulp, followed by the hollow thump of his violin case hitting the paving stones.

What have I begun? The thought skittered through his mind before it vanished in the haze. The grizzled old man was advancing quickly and for the first time he got a very good look at the power hidden beneath his aged flesh. His heart dropped and a new emotion began to build in his chest.

Fear...

Abruptly the world changed around him. The people faded into a gray mist, the paving stones twisted, melting into one another, become blacker. They solidified, forming into the jagged surface of black tarmac, a dotted yellow line racing up its center. Over head lightning flashed in a rolling sea of black storm clouds, peeling thunder racing after the flashes, doomed for forever chase but never catch. Ahead of him the grizzled old man seemed to melt, his skin peeling from his body in great swaths of pale paste. Flames sprang up from the ground where his feet touched, melting the tarmac into pools of liquid night. Twisting horns exploded from the crest of his forehead, flames licking the air as they grew, forming a crown of fire atop his head and his eyes burst into orange yellow flames. His twisting smile grew until his nearly split his face in two, rows upon rows of gleaming white fangs protruding from behind his lips as the maw opened slowly.

A hot wind rose then, from behind the grizzled old man turned daemon but he hardly felt it. His mind was racing, his heart trying its hardest to catch it, and he blinked once, slowly as his worst nightmares became reality before him.

'My god what have I done?'

[Bloodrose]

Bunnying approved.

The crowd reacted to the boy's attempts at escape about as well as Teric had, their hands and voices forcing the young man back into the circle as the mob mentality settled on violence. Sure, there were undoubtedly men, women, and children in the crowd who might individually harbor no desire to witness one human being beating another, but when swept up in the emotion of the crowd, not one person did anything to stem the coming violence.

Without further ado, Teric threw a punch.

The young man with the case - little more than a hapless bystander up until chance planted him in this situation - froze up so badly that he didn't even seem to notice the blow coming, let alone do anything to stop it. Teric's opening salvo landed flush on the boy's jaw, and the poor lad dropped to the street like a sack of potatoes.

The sound of the blow - something akin to the noise a brick might make when hitting a side of beef - shot through the crowd like an Aleran musket-shot, silencing them. For all the build up and tension - all the expectation - the fight ended quicker than it had begun. One simple punch reduced the battle the crowd had been anticipating into an old geezer rubbing his knuckles over the prone figure of a young man nursing his jaw. There were more than a few disappointed murmurs as those closest to the 'fight' waved their hands in disgust and turned to leave. People farther back - those who relied on the people crowded in front of them to find out what was going on - lingered longer, asking for information as everyone went back about their business.

Teric used his thumb to massage the knuckles of his middle and index finger appreciatively as he looked down on his former opponent. The young man was cupping the left side of his face with both hands, blood dribbling from the corner of his mouth. One punch had been all it took to lay the luckless bastard out on the cobblestones, and the longer he lingered over the boy, the worse Teric started to feel about it.

I suppose I didn't really need to hit him in the face to teach him a lesson. The mercenary was pondering, his expression grim. The anger that had burned in his chest - lit originally by the fisherman and stoked by the young man's trash talk - was extinguished now; snuffed out by the complete disappointment that had been their brawl. Teric found himself feeling like his anger would have only been satisfied if the boy had at least attempted to fight back, but he hadn't. Their exchange had been so one-sided that even a mercenary had to feel at least a little sorry for the man.

"Well," Teric started, not really sure what to say now. "I'm sure, uh... you know... Let that be a lesson to you."

[Sumnner]

The daemon advanced quickly, fire surrounding it like a halo from hell, and its wicked grin drew back even further as it raised its clawed fist into the air. He was frozen in fear, his mind racing, screaming commands to his body to move, but he could only watch in growing horror as the fist drew ever closer to his face. He hissed, a quickly inward drawn breath through clenched teeth and barely parted lips and squeezed his eyes shut, as if to block out the pain to come by simply refusing to watch it happen. There was a brief moment of nothing, when the dread of the coming blow, when the memory of a life without pain, when the fear so strong within his breast that he thought he might burst all collided together in a spectacular explosion of bright white light and thunderous sound. The world faded...

...and he awoke to find himself staring at the pale, sand colored paving stones of the dock yard, nursing a throbbing jaw. He coughed, more out of surprise than an actual need to, and stared dumbly at the small droplets of blood that sprayed from his mouth. Something tickled the inside of his mouth and he worked his jaw from side to side. After a moment he sucked the saliva pooling in his mouth and spat it out into a moderate sized puddle in front of him. It was streaked with crismon and ran quickly down into the cracks between the stones. He coughed again before pushing himself to his feet, wiping his face as he did so.

All around him the crowd was moving away, mostly in disgust, but a few lingered for a moment to direct disapproving or angry stares in his direction. A few people were laughing, shouting to others across from them about how they shouldn't have bet on such a stupid thing, and still others shouted about how it had been a one-sided fight from the beginning and shouldn't've been bet on in the first place. Soon those that had been close enough to watch the, encounter, were melted into the crowd and those that were close, only saw a young man bleeding from the mouth and a grizzled old man nursing a few of his knuckles.

Suddenly everything that had just happened hit home, really hit home for the first time and embarrassment filled him, along with a burning desire to hide. He quickly cast around for his violin case, he vaguely remembered dropping it, and found it a few feet from where he stood staring out into the crowd. Thankfully no one had opened it, or even snatched it up in the confusion, and he quickly shoulder it. His eyes found the grizzled old man and for a moment, he simply stared at him, his eyes beginning to tear with the embarrassment he now felt. Something the man had said tickled his brain and he felt his lips quiver.

"Yes," he mumbled as he turned away from the older man. "Perhaps a lesson for the both of us then." Then he plunged himself into the moving crowd, careful not to push anyone to roughly out of the way, and soon he was lost in its press. His stomach growled loudly and he could feel his headache beginning to return. The throbbing in his jaw hadn't diminished in the slightest bit and he knew that the following morning, if not sooner, his face was going to swell tremendously.

All of this quickly became lost in the haze of his thoughts however, except for one brightly burning thought, and that was that he had to get away and hide. Someplace dark, someplace safe.

Someplace very far away.