A Prelude To Violence

[Connor Lacuna]

"It was the skeleton of a civilization. The expedition was searching through the shells of ancient buildings, and it was hard enough just getting around the place. The jungle's foliage was more sparse in the city, but there was still as much shadow as light, and plenty of places to hide. The rain came in waves and lightning flashed every once in a while. I was sitting more or less under a tree by a pile of rubble and trash. The little fuck I was guarding, named something Elvish, with more vowels than I can pronounce, he was digging through every pile of shit he came across, taking out pieces of old pots and urns and shouting out 'remarkable' every fifteen seconds. There were two others following us, neither of them doing much to help. They poked at rubble, I guess. The tree wasn't making very good cover from the rain, so I was still soaked. I was wearing, at the time, a full suit of armor, a helmet, and a pair of sandals. I wasn't wearing my boots because I've heard the stories of footrot, and wasn't too keen on that idea. Still, I hate sandals, and they weren't at all helping my situation."

I take a sip of my beer, and by now even the bartender looks like he's genuinely interested. Him, I think, I hooked in with the sandal comment.

"Finally, after the elf kid finished poking through that pile of trash, we were moving. We came across a hole in the ground that looked pretty much like something came through and tore a hole in the ruins. Somewhere along the line, a giant spider came along and I lost one of my axes when it ran away, but that's not the interesting part."

I almost forgot about that axe. That was a really nice axe, damn it.

"Anyway, the kid took one look down that hole and just about shit himself with excitement. He didn't see anything down there, mind you, he just figured there would be something. Naturally, I had my reservations, but the kid was paying me for this, a flat rate plus a percentage of what we found. The other elves, they followed pretty loosely and one bugged out as soon as he saw the spider, dropping his finds and, as far as we were concerned, giving up his share. We climbed down into the hole with a rope, searching each level on the way down. He thought it'd be better to go straight down and sweep our way back up, but I didn't want to get surrounded and killed, so we did it my way. Him and the other scholar kid scraped through the floor and took anything fancy, shiny, magic, or with writing on it, while I peeked around corners and beat rats and bugs over the head. We moved down to the last floor without too much going wrong-- The kid's companion, or whatever he was, cut his arm on something, and had to bandage it up, and I almost got bit by rats a few times."

I'm onto my second drink now.

"Then, well, I guess you could say that things got hairy."