Looking for a friend, any friend (Open to anyone willing to join)

[Unlucky]

Sylvia sat slumped over in an alleyway, her head between her legs. There was nothing that could be worse than her life. She had tried to make many friends recently, but all of them either died got seriously wounded do to her curse. She needed a friend, a dependable, and preferably extremely lucky or indestructible friend. She needed a friend who wouldn't be affected by her curse.

The alleyway was littered with dust and trash. Sylvia stood up and walked away from the alley, unable to stand her hunger, or the smell, any longer. As she left the town, the archway over the town gate fell behind her, crushing one of the guards. This was exactly why she never stayed in the same town for long. Her curse affected everyone she ever cared about, as well as a few random people, in order to affect her.

When Sylvia looked back at the crashing noise, in order to see if the curse injured or killed the guard, someone ran straight into her, knocking her on her butt.

"Watch where you are going" The man said to her. He then looked at the town sign and shook his head.

"Crap, wrong town again. I'm supposed to be in Allinea, not Tallim. I've got a meeting there in 45 minutes. You got any clue where it is?"

Sylvia did know where the town of Allinea was. In fact, she had just come from there before she came here. for anyone other than her, it was a 15 minute walk from Tallim. Problem was, her curse would likely turn it into a 40 minute walk. Still, that was within the man's time restraints, so she shyly nodded.

"Will you please take me there?" The man asked.

Sylvia thought about saying yes, but shook her head no. If she tried, something bad would happen to the man for sure.

The man got real angry, real fast, not understanding that Sylvia was trying to protect him and pulled a knife on her.

"Take me there, woman."

Sylvia finally looked the man up and down. He looked drunk, which would explain his rash actions and the reason he was lost.

He was a white male, about 6'2" he had blue eyes, black hair, and the garbs of a soldier of Allinea. Yup, he had to be drunk if he was unable to find his own town.

After realizing he was about to sully the knife with her blood, Sylvia finally nodded.

"Fine, fine. I'll take you there." Maybe some people did deserve to be affected by her curse.

[Ladies' Man]

Gabriel could hear voices, but they didn’t register in his mind as more than the pleasant murmurings of the cows that he’d been dreaming about for the past few days. There was something hard digging into the side of his face, but he didn’t have the energy to lift his hand to move it. It was probably a rock, anyway. He’d been hit with rocks before, pelted with them as he ran from town with the rest of the nomad caravan that he’d been bumming a ride with. He hadn’t realized that people hated nomads so much. He didn’t think they’d actually stolen anything from the angry peasants, but then again he had been drunk out of his mind for the majority of the trip and his opinion wasn’t exactly trustworthy.

The top side of his face was uncomfortably warm from being exposed to sunlight all day. He laboriously lifted a hand to his cheek and estimated from the pain of his sunburn that he’d been lying out on the side of the road for about half a day . . . give or take a few days. His head was spinning and his throat felt like tanned leather. Given the intensity of his hangover, it couldn’t have been more than a day. The trouble was that his hangovers usually just precipitated alcohol binges that left him drunker than he'd been before. It was a downward spiral, certainly, but the half-conscious, semi-drunken state that he achieved between inebriation and the next hangover was, while physically unplesant, something of a mental nirvana. His thoughts drifted seamlessly from one pointless topic to the next, nothing bothered him, and all the world around him seemed to be made of cotton and beautiful women. And when he was there, no painful memories could come up and make him feel guilty for being a failure.

If only the sun wasn't shining so brightly! He wanted to force himself to fall asleep again until it was dark enough to risk trying to find a tavern, but the voices he heard kept replaying in his mind. Something about what they said bothered him, but he couldn’t distract himself for long enough to focus. Where were the nomads? They’d offered him a ride from Knife’s Edge to the next major town on the road they were traveling, but once he’d gotten onto their flamboyantly decorated wagon he hadn’t left. He’d been ripping drunk for the duration of what could have been a fun-filled journey of moral compassing and character-developing adventure, but now that they'd apparently given up on his sorry behind, he idly wondered how long he'd spent in their company.

Gabriel forced his eyes open, staring at the tall grass that met his gaze until his head's throbbing dimmed enough for him to look around. The sky was still above him, the ground was still holding him up from below, and the partially-gloved hand in front of his face still had all five of its fingers. His backpack was still hanging on his shoulders, and he could feel the comforting weight of his daggers in their various hidden sheaths about his person. He hadn’t been robbed, at least. Good old nomads.

With a muffled groan, Gabriel pushed himself to his knees, forcing his eyes to stay open as he swayed queasily. He was a few yards away from the road, just outside a town whose name-giving sign was too blurry to read. There were two people on the road in front of him, one a tall guard and the other a little girl who was sitting in the dust. He would have assumed that the girl was the guard’s daughter if the guy hadn’t been holding a knife with a splay-legged stance that Gabriel recognized as the posture of a man who wasn’t quite sure that the ground was going to stay still beneath his feet.

Indignation rose like bile in Gabriel’s dry throat. What kind of man pulled a knife on a little beggar girl? Chivalrous impulses that had long been drowning in cheap wine suddenly sprang to the partially dry forefront of Gabriel’s mind, spurring him to action and clearing away some of the fog that had clouded his judgment for far too long. He may not have looked it, but Gabriel was a noble, and it was noble blood that ran through his veins, noble blood that would not stand by and allow the mistreatment of innocents.

Suddenly feeling a lot more sober than he had in weeks, Gabriel rose to his feet, fighting the dizziness that made him stagger as he stepped into the road, approaching the man with an only slightly glazed expression of disapproval.

“Good sir,” he began, but he didn’t continue when his foot unexpectedly caught on a rock and pitched him headlong to the ground. He took a moment, lying flat on his face, to regain his dignity and orientation before he stood up again, brushing himself off with a blasé composure that belied the furious mortification in his head. Since when did Gabriel Talisman trip? He fixed his double vision on the guard and decided against nodding politely, afraid that the motion might cause him to lose his balance. It wouldn’t do to fall over again.

“Good sir,” he repeated, his voice only slightly hoarse, “I see that you are dressed in the illustrious armor of a guard, which indicates your prestigious position as a protector of the people of . . . uh, this country.” He still didn’t remember where he was. “I do not mean to question your authority as a justice-enforcing hand of the government, but may I ask why it is that you draw your weapon against a clearly unarmed and obviously not dangerous girl? Surely she poses no threat to someone of your obvious military skill.”

He would have kept talking, caught up in the mesmerizing cadence of his own eloquence, but a sudden clenching of his stomach told him that words would not be the only thing pouring copiously from his mouth if he didn’t shut it immediately, a realization that further baffled him. He may not have had much experience as a drunk, but he had quickly learned to pride himself on his ability to hold down his liquor. He always won drinking competitions and had a cleaner vomit record than most sober men. Since when did Gabriel Talisman puke?

[Unlucky]

Sylvia was somewhat thankful when a man came to help her out, but she was also somewhat wary. She knew that if he came too close, something bad would happen to him, but when all that happened was him tripping and a bit later, him puking, she looked confused. Yes, this was obviously her curse at work, but why was it only affecting him in minor ways? Was his luck that good?

She hated to admit it, but if that was the case, she would need him to come with her. It was weird, though. Normally, somebody would have laughed when the man tripped, but she saw it as normal. Normally someone like her would have been grossed out and worried when the man threw up, but, though it still grossed her out, she was more relieved than worried. It meant that her curse wasn't affecting him as much as most people. She looked back at the guard who had drawn a weapon on her. Right on cue, a kid ran off with his wallet. She thought so, the extreme bad luck of her curse was affecting him too.

Looking back at the man who just arrived on the scene, she decided to try to be honest with him, and tell him about her curse, but what she ended up saying made little to no sense.

"I don't think you want to be around me,in fact you are better off not being around me. Thing is, I would prefer it if you were to stick around and help me escort this guy to Allinea. So, I guess I don't want you around, but I do want you around."

She paused realizing how little sense this made.

"I'll explain later." She said, realizing it wasn't a good idea to say it in front of the guard.

Sylvia really needed to leave before things got any worse in the town. Suddenly she felt it start to rain. She could have sworn there wasn't a cloud in the sky until now. It was going to be yet another abysmal day for her, she could tell.

[Ladies' Man]

“Who the hell are you?” The tall man’s voice was only slightly slurred, but his blue eyes crossed as he tried to focus then on Gabriel, his lips twisted in a sneer.

Gabriel swallowed hard and hesitantly opened his mouth. “Gabriel is my name, sir, and defending injustice is my game—er, that’s defending justice, not injustice." What was wrong with his tongue? "I just don’t think you should be bothering a kid like her when . . .” His words trailed off as he looked at the small person on the ground and realized that it wasn’t a little girl at all. It was an elf! He hadn’t seen an elf since he was a little kid! He hoped it was a promising sign. He'd been told that meeting an elf was supposed to bring ten years of good luck, and as far as he was concerned it was about time he had a change in fortune.

A blur of motion on the side of the road made Gabriel painstakingly turn his bleary eyes towards the guard in time to see a snot-covered urchin dart out of the tall grass and make a beeline for the guard’s pocket. The kid had grabbed and gone before Gabriel could so much as blink, but when he looked up, he saw that the guard was still glaring at him angrily and hadn’t even noticed. Gabriel would have shrugged physically if the movement wouldn’t have started off fireworks in his head, but he lifted the corner of his mouth in a smile that ended up looking more like a grimace.

The elf on the ground spoke, her voice a soft murmur that nonetheless bore a note of grimness that Gabriel hadn’t expected. Weren’t elves happy creatures? His eyebrows rose when she finished speaking, but he quickly lowered them at the pain that even that simple motion caused. At least she had mastered the stereoptyically cryptic style of speech. Maybe it was a riddle . . .

“You’re gonna help him?” Gabriel couldn’t keep the confusion out of his voice. The guy had just pulled a knife on her and she was still willing to play tour guide for him? Elven women were certainly made of more tolerant stuff than most of the human ones he knew.

The sky’s bladder suddenly gave out in a flash torrent that drenched Gabriel’s hair in a heartbeat and pattered soothingly at the headache that had been burning up his forehead. The elf looked pathetic dressed in rags and sitting in the dirt that was swiftly turning into mud, and still bursting with chivalry he quickly reached into his backpack, muttering a curse as the clasp broke while he was opening it. He took out one of his extra long-sleeved shirts and held it out to the elf with a magnanimous smile. His blurred vision, however, was affecting his depth perception, and the shirt dangled from his fingers a few feet out of her reach. It didn’t matter, though, because a sharp gust of wind chose that moment to blow sinuously through and smacked the shirt out of Gabriel’s hand. His face went red and he doubled over reflexively to pick it up, berating himself for his unprecedented clumsiness as his head swam at the sudden elevation change.

“Get lost, punk,” the guard snapped, and he ended the friendly rejoinder with a sudden violent sneeze that was made even more violent by the way his fingers reflexively loosened their hold on his dagger as his hand jerked away from his body, flinging the knife amidst a shower of mucus; the latter of which landed cheerfully across Gabriel’s unprotected head and side. Considering that the throw was unintentional, the dagger probably should have clattered harmlessly away, or, given that Gabriel was bent over, sailed harmlessly over the drunk noble's head.

As luck would have it, the guard’s knife didn’t fall harmlessly. It sailed through the rain-clogged air and made a graceful arc over Gabriel’s head before dropping with unlikely speed about a foot away from his face, slicing across the forearm of the arm that was extended towards the dropped shirt.

Gabriel heard the sneeze, felt the splatter, and saw the iron blade drop past his face, but he saw the red gush of blood on his arm before he felt the bite of the knife’s blade. He yelped in surprised pain and jumped upright, the force of his movement sending him off balance again so that he tottered back, tripped over the same rock that had toppled him before, and fell hard onto his rear in the middle of a shiny new puddle that immediately began to soak merrily into his clothes.

The guard glanced at him with scorn and went to pick up his dagger, not noticing the bird dropping that landed on his back or the loud bark that sounded when his pants split as he bent over.

“’Scuse me,” he sniffed as he rose, wiping his nose on the back of his hand before pointing the knife again at the elf. “Now come on, let’s go!”

[Unlucky]

"No need to be so hostile, I said I'd help, so I'll help." Sylvia said to the man as part of the town's wall came crashing down. One brick landed on her foot, which hurt like a bitch, while another landed on the man's blade, breaking it in two. Sylvia pushed the brick off her foot before realizing the soldier was talking again.

"What in hell's name is going on here? Could it be...." The man said trailing off at the end in such a way that not even the elven woman could hear the end of his sentence. Had he guessed that she was the cause of this? Had he guessed about her curse? She couldn't think of anything worse than if this soldier knew about her curse, until...

"You, these things only started to happen once you showed up. Stop the funny stuff right now. I'm not at all amused." The soldier was pointing at the man behind her when he said this. Did he really blame Gabriel for this?

Sylvia looked the soldier straight in the eye and tried to tell him the truth without being too obvious about it.

"What are you doing blaming him? Just as much bad luck has hit him as you, if not more. If you want to make a believable claim, blame me." Another brick fell off the wall and somehow landed in her rags, pulling them down, and leaving her completely nude for a few seconds. She quickly pushed the brick off her rags and put them back on. This couldn't be good at all. At least two men had seen her completely nude, as if that wasn't bad enough, both were drunk. She would be lucky if neither of them got any ideas.

Remembering the shirt that was offered to her, Sylvia looked around for it and found finally spotted it laying near a bank. So much for that idea. She wasn't about to go near a public building like that knowing full well that her bad luck may cause the building to explode.

The guard shook his head.

"You ain't a likely candidate for the culprit either, my boobiful miss... Er... beautiful miss. Someone is trying to delay me, though. I've got to get to that town in 30 minutes, so you'd better hurry and take me there."

How could this day get any worse? Her bad luck was acting up way more often than usual, but as far as she knew she didn't care for either man, did she? Looking back at Gabriel, she realized that she did. He saved her worthless life. That was enough reason to like him as any. Damn. she did like him. She was hoping she wouldn't have to deal with another friend getting injured or dying, but it seemed that she might be forced to endure that pain yet again. Stupid curse.

"We'd better leave before this whole town falls apart." Sylvia said glumly.

[Dehkan]

Nearby, Dehkan was oblivious to the goings on around him, as he always was while in the vast library of his own mind. In reality, he was seated cross-legged on some crates against a building, but his mind was elsewhere. In a trance, the mans' inner self walked the pathways of his intellect. This took the form of a library, with thousands of shelves, each one over a hundred feet high, all crammed with tomes.

Dehkan was looking for the history of this particular region, as it seemed unfamiliar to him. Knowledge he accessed on a regular basis was always available to him, but if not, it was here, in this library. Not here. He said aloud, a fact that didn't carry to reality. His body never said a word. Must've been colonized since my departure. Dehkan had been gone from Althanas for a long time, but as always, he returned to previously visited worlds to absorb knowledge that was new.

His unique abilities made Dehkan a walking mass of knowledge, for he knew almost over half of the accumulated information that the universe had to offer, granted that no more tomes were devised. What he didn't know was, just a few yards around the building against which he was leaning, a scene was taking place. A scene which contained a buzzed guard with a dagger, a nude elf, and a completly hung over womanizer. What Dehkan didn't know, won't hurt him. To all those looking at his body, he just appeared to be a homless man, wearing strange armor, sleeping peacefully.

[Ladies' Man]

Gabriel’s eyes widened in indignation. Was the oaf daring to blame him for the strange misfortune that had befallen them? He hadn’t been subjected to so concentrated a dose of improbable calamity before in his life! Heck, he was the luckiest person he knew! He was about to jump to his feet to defend his honor, but the little elf woman beat him to it, and when he tried to get up a wave of dizziness helped him decide to stay seated for just a little longer. He used the downtime to fuss with his arm while he tried to figure out what was going on.

The situation had seemed a little more urgent from his facedown roadside perch when the big man with the knife was taking advantage of a poor and destitute child. From his current vantage point, however, the circumstances were quite different from what initial impressions had indicated. The little girl was an elf, for one thing, and she didn’t seem to be entirely concerned with the fact that this presumably unknown assailant was forcing her to do things against her will. Then again, the man didn’t even have a whole knife at the moment, and he seemed to be not so much forcing her to help him as he was insisting that she aid him. That might not have seemed a great chasm of differentiation, but the distinction made all the difference in Gabriel’s wine-fuddled brain as he looked up.

“Well, if you’re going to help him, then—” Gabriel’s tongue fell still as his jaw fell open, his gaze frozen on the minute elf before him who had just finished pulling her clothes back on. He blinked hard and tried to restart his breathing. What had he missed? Had she just been unclothed? She certainly didn’t look too happy about whatever had just occured, but Gabriel was cursing himself for his inattetion, for having stared at his stupid bleeding arm when there had been a naked elf not five feet away from him.

The guard spoke again, his voice exhibiting a fresh note of distracted admiration, his tone much more civil than it had been before. Gabriel glared jealously up at the guard. He’d obviously gotten an eyeful. Why did the ugly ones always get the girls?

“Wait!” Gabriel scrambled dizzily to his feet, accidentally stepping on the hem of his coat as he stood so that a long detached strip of cloth was left hanging down the side of his leg. “If you insist on guiding this man to . . . that place where he needs to be, I insist on accompanying you. My name is Gabriel, and it would be my honor to protect you.” He threw a defiant glare at the guard, daring the blonde man to challenge him. He wasn't going along just in the hope of another elven unveiling; he still didn't trust the lout to behave like a gentleman. As if he’d leave that sick pervert alone with this hapless, beautiful elf.

Gabriel had never been much of a philosopher, but his sodden mind had been paddling around in his skull while he drank himself into oblivion and he'd gotte into the habit of concocting explanations for things that he really had no business attempting to explain. The only explanation for the misfortunes that had befallen them, he decided, was that the three of them had some kind of supernatural bond that caused snares in the fiber of the universe. There was obviously some antagonistic tension between himself and the guard, and perhaps the contradictingly congenial bond between himself and the elf was clashing with their instinctive dislike for the guard. The universe couldn’t stand for the three of them to be in company and so was throwing every weapon of catastrophe in their path in an effort to separate them!

The theory made so much sense to Gabriel that he only smiled smugly when a bird dropped dead out of the sky and hit his shoulder hard enough to leave a bruise on its way down. Elves were noble creatures, and she'd promised him her help and therefore wouldn't leave him until she'd fulfilled her vow. He pulled his coat tighter around his torso when the wind picked up, shaking his head ruefully—and stopping quickly with a wince— when one of the buttons popped off in his hand. He didn't even know where the guy needed to go, so there was no possibility of sending the elf away. They were really only left with one option. It was shaping up to be a long and probably painful afternoon, but now that he had the universe’s scheme figured out, he was determined not to leave the maiden’s side.

One step towards her was all he could take before he was struck by a wave of dizziness that almost made him black out completely. His stomach was apparently still upset with him, but it wasn’t just the residual alcohol that was affecting him. The cut on his arm hadn’t stopped bleeding, and blood was trickling at a steady pace down his arm and off the tips of his fingers. Gabriel pulled back his sleeve to peek at the cut, grimacing as his shirt ripped in the process. Too much time in these people's company and he'd be just as tattered as the elf. The wound needed to be tended to, but there was no chance of him leaving the elf alone with the guard. He swayed a little on his feet as he wrapped the ripped sleeve of his shirt around the cut in a badly made bandage, blinking steadily as he tried to decide which one of the elves in front of him was the real one. He felt as though he were on a boat, rocking back and forth on rollicking stormy waves. The feeling didn't do his nausea any favors.

“Lead on, good lady,” a slurred voice called out. It took Gabriel a long moment to realize that the speaker had been him.

[Unlucky]

Sylvia looked at the Gabriel.

"You ok, mister? You don't look to good." She said as she pointed the soldier she was escorting in the correct direction.

"I'll catch up in a second!" She yelled at him.

Turning her attention back to Gabriel, she quietly spoke to him.

"You are one lucky man. I've never seen anyone as lucky as you before. Before you accompany me, I think you should know what is going on. Everything that's happened so far is my fault. I've been cursed with bad luck. I don't want you to get any more hurt than you need to. You must have extremely good luck to have only escaped with a cut. Most people I meet are seriously wounded within the first 20 minutes. That is why I'm agreeing to escort this idiot. I hate him so much that he deserves to take on the full brunt of my curse, but you don't. I beg you to please leave. I don't want you to die because of my curse."

As if her curse were saying "You ain't ditching him that easily", A stampede of Elephants started to stampede through the town, towards them. Just like the rain, this seemed to be completely and utterly random. Her eyes grew wide in horror as she grabbed his arm.

"Come on! This way!" She yelled out to him, running right back to the soldier she was escorting.

The elephants trampled the archway that had fallen on the one guard just before Gabriel had shown up, and in effect, trampled the guard, killing him, a few minutes soon as she left the town, a white mouse scurried past the entrance. The elephants, seein this, turned tail and ran the other way, and in effect retrampled the dead guard. This was gonna be a long day.

[Dehkan]

In the corner of his mind's eye, a gold book flashed into existance in Dehkan's library of the mind. It had it's own podium, and it has never shown itself before.

As he drew closer the the mysterious book, it suddenly opened. It contained no words, only a moving picture. Dehkan tried to decipher the image, but it seemed to be moving too fast. It vaguely resembled a large animal, no a large group of animals. A stampede? He thought, what does it mean?

Dehkan's eyes jerked open, and he saw them. A stampede of elefants running towards the building acting as his back rest. He leaned forward, and with his foot, propelled himself forward with all his might. The horde of mammals demolished the house, and sent a large portion to collide with the immortal. Of all the bad luck. He thought, and braced himself.

With a loud crash, the wall fragment slammed against Dehkan, forcing him into a nearby rock wall, knocking him out. He collapsed under the weight of the wooden shards of what used to be a wall, and slipped back into his trance, unable to awaken on his own.

[Ladies' Man]

Gabriel’s eyes narrowed as he watched the guard head off in the elf’s indicated direction, and he snickered when the drunk man slipped in a mud puddle on his way. He sobered instantly when the raggedy elf spoke, blinking down at her in an attempt to grasp what she was saying. Her fault? His theory was wrong then, if all their misfortune was being caused just by this young woman’s presence. But how could he be wrong? His explanation had made so much sense!

“A curse?”

She never had the opportunity to answer. The ground began to shake below their feet and a torrent of huge grey monsters came pouring down the street, long snouts lifted high and trumpeting as they charged in a mindless crowd down the fortuitously unpopulated street. Gabriel’s mouth fell open in shock and he might have been crushed beneath the stomping feet of the approaching monsters if the elf’s tugging pull hadn’t forcefully dragged him away.

Gabriel was still trying to comprehend her revelation, but it was hard for him to think and run and stare over his shoulder and bleed all at the same time, and every rock on the road seemed to jump up and try to trip him as they chased after the guard. So . . . it wasn’t the universe conspiring against them? It was just her that had angered some divine malevolent force? The news was kind of disappointing. She could get him killed just by standing next to him? Only most people didn’t last twenty minutes, she'd said. He’d lived through . . . a lot more, right? Time seemed to be taking a nap, as far as his perception of it was concerned, but it was irrelevant anyway. Even if she was an unwilling hazard to his health, he had given his word, and drunk or not he was still a noble and his word was worth a lot more than the threat of some curse.

“Don’t worry,” he yelled reassuringly to her, ducking when dislodged bricks incongruously came flying at their heads from the toppled wall behind them, “I’m not going anywhere!”

He thought about what he had just said for a few seconds before adding, “except with you!”

It was disconcertingly comforting to find out that she was only fulfilling her promise in order to kill off the sleazebag, but it was almost insulting of her to ask him to leave when he had already made it clear that he had every intention of escorting the lady and her charge as far as they needed to go.