Then My Troubles Began
The minotaur's ball, a new job and a most unusual game.
The Minotaur's Ball was a semi-collapsed tavern in a virtually entirely collapsed mining town on the Brettonia/Empire border. On the outside it had looked like a sagging, waterlogged little bungalow, but on the inside it looked more like a strange chapel, a shrine to some kind of green and white obsessed deity. I found a seat on a little corner booth with a green and white checkered table cloth, and a little green and white sofa. I ordered a drink from a dwarf with a green and white beard and a green and white apron that was served in a green and white mug with a green and white umbrella (as was the Altdorf style 30 years ago). I had turned up between miner shifts so I was the bars only customer. While a plump, middle-aged brettonian maiden wiped mugs behind the bar. I got talking to the proprietor, a dwarf who, I learned, had spent his entire life in this town, most of it down mineshafts until he had earned enough goldpieces to open this place. The maiden was his wife (interspecies marriage is common in towns like these. When there are 6 lonely miners to every female, you can't nit-pick) and the beer was a dwarf variety distilled from centipedes. "So what's with all the green?" I enquired "I've nothing against the colour but it's sort of a monotonous colour scheme." "In tribute to our town's blood bowl team of course!" I looked at him blankly. "Blood bowl? The hammers? The greatest sport in the history of the old world? My god, where have you been boy!"
Where I'd been was traversing the worlds edge mountains with the imperial legion of Talabheim, waiting four years for an Ogre invasion that had apparently collapsed into petty infighting before they even reached Mt Gunbad. "Away" I replied "So this Blood Bowl thing, some kind of game is it?"
"My friend, Blood Bowl , or to give it it's full title, Nuffle Amorical Football is much more than a game. Every match is a matter of life and death (usually death) for all involved, but it's also much more important than that. It is played on a specially marked field 100 by 60 Human paces long by 2 teams of 11 players. Each team begins the game on opposite halves of the pitch. One team has the ball (an inflated pigs bladder) and they must try and take it to the end zone of the opponents side to score. The game lasts a little over an hour, with a break half way, and at the end the. team with the most scores wins."
"And what does the team that doesn't have the bladder do?"
"They have to try and get the ball by any means necessary and take it to the opponent's end zone, or just play out the clock. And when I say by any means, I mean there are only two rules when it comes to tackling, and we rarely pay attention to them anyway. 1:you can't hit a player on the ground without appropriately bribing or intimidating the referee. 2: No weapons other than your own body. Now Blood Bowl might sound dangerous, but theres really only one thing you need to know when it comes to staying alove-"
Just then an entire shift of thirsty miners marched into the bar, filling the room with soot and noise. The proprietor stood up and swiftly climbed behind the bar to begin serving. I considered taking my beer and going up to my room, but soon I was crammed into my booth by a gang of laughing Dwarves. My new friends bought me some more of that centipede ale and started drilling me with questions about the Army, about the mountains, whether I had met their cousin who was an engineer with the Talabheims.
I remember something about a yard of ale, a riveting debate about window tax and finally saying "I used to be a bookkeeper for the countess of Nuln!" before being punched very hard in the face
The shaking if the cart woke me up, the smell of coal and sweat dragged me into consciousness. My head hurt like I'd been punched by a dwarf. Also I had a hangover like I'd been drinking ridiculous Dwarven beer. At this point I remembered that those things had both happened, and vowed bloody revenge against myself for doing this to me.
But that could wait. Right now I was in what looked like a very small house with a wooden peaked roof. Large wooden rafters stretched across the upside down v shaped ceiling. The thing about this house was that it was moving, bouncing from side to side like a cart on a country road. Every bump felt like my brain was rolling about inside my skull. Across from me was a gently snoring dwarf with a smouldering pipe hanging from his lips and resting on his frizzy grey beard.
"I can't deal with this right now" I thought as I drifted back to sleep.
That lasted about 5 seconds.
I woke up again half way through being thrown out the back of the cart. The dwarf with the pipe held me by my waist and collar and sent me flying out to the side of the road, mercifully sparing me from the wheel and hooves of the cart following us. I rolled in the dust, loosing the hat I'd somehow held onto this far in the ditch. No sooner had crawled to my knees than another hand grabbed my collar, pulling me in a single motion onto the rearmost cart in the convoy.
The hand belonged to a black bearded elderly dwarf in gold trimmed black armour, and a gaint mechanical arm that he had gripped my by the collar with.
"Welcome friend!" He said in a grizzled but cheerfull voice "Sorry about Dirk there, he just thought you were a stowaway. I probably should have warned him that you were joining us"
Shock paralyzing my mind, I tried to decide which question to ask first. "hu, uh uh…Who? Deh, Us?" I gargled out.
"Don't worry friend, you're probably just in shock at your own good luck! Not much work for an accountant in these parts, you probably just expected to wind up guarding a caravan or some such nonsense! Now, you can start work immediately, it's all just through here." The caraven was just like the others, it looked like a little chapel on wheels, complete with windows and a slate roof. He opened the double doors at the front and pushed me inside. There I was faced with a huge pile of gold coins that stretched to the ceiling, and around that a forest of crumpled scrolls of paper and velum. There was also several large quills and ceiled pots of ink. "Well, work it is then" I said, as I passed out on a bed made of accounts.