Entry #2 - "The Ace Team"
Tharsis, Saehrimnir Inn, 3 AM
"Captain Baldory, you really must get to sleep. It's not good for you to be up so late like this," the innkeeper said quietly as she wrapped a blanket around Baldory's shoulders.
"This is the only time where I'm with my own thoughts. My men aren't supposed to know about this evaluation, and they're awake and close by all hours of the day. If I don't do this now, the Outland Count will never see it," Baldory responded.
"Yes, but you still need your rest," the innkeeper countered.
"I'll rest once I've finished this entry. I don't need to turn it in right away - the Count is very generous with his patience. But thank you for showing concern for me," Baldory replied.
The innkeeper nodded and quietly left the room. When he was certain the door was shut, Baldory took up his pen.
Guild Captain's Evaluation, Entery 2/15: "The Ace Team"
I realize that I never explained my reasoning behind the fifteen entries in my previous report. What I intend to do is first evaluate the separate teams I've placed my men in, and then the separate groups they belong to. I've also made room for the Sedassis crew - they've helped my people and I so much that I would be a dishonest man if I didn't include them, regardless of the fact that they're not technically part of Bernoryn. There's thirty people in the guild, proper, so there are five teams. I've already evaluated myself in a separate report. The crew takes a seventh spot. And the respective groups the guild members belong to will take up the remaining eight places, if my math is sound.
I have often been told my method of doing things is strange. I don't deny it.
Now then, to the evaluation. This first team is who I privately call my "ace team." They are comprised of the four who accompanied me on the Iridescent Ore mission, with the addition of one of my three Nightseekers, Nachtdol - of the three, he is the most business-minded, and possibly the least sexually aroused by killing things. Thank goodness for small favors.
The four I traveled with, I know well their capabilities. They were strong and capable enough to see us through to victory with very little ordering about from me, and all without dying, though injuries were sustained. And having now seen what Nachtdol is capable of, I'm certain that I can trust them with the heaviest weight of this guild's responsibilities.
There is one setback to them, however... They're, er... oh, there's no polite way to say this. They're imbeciles.
I should clarify, they're all very brilliant in their own ways. Heilarzt, young and foul-tempered though he is, is about one of the most talented Medics I've ever met; Armelas is like a cockroach, which I intend as a compliment because she's practically indestructible, despite all the harm she comes to; Nordauber might not be the most personable fellow, but I would be hard pressed to trust many other Runemasters to have my back in a fight; Schiverta is equal parts a bull and a wall of steel, wrapped into one frighteningly large package; and Nachtdol, though he might not be the most stealthy of Nightseekers, has a way with moving quickly and striking weak points that I, myself, could never hope to challenge.
I say that they're imbeciles because their strengths are very singular, and pronounce their weaknesses greatly. Armelas' indestructible nature seems only to exist due in great part to her foolishness - she carries a shield that she never thinks to use, for one thing, and she's rather absent-minded at the worst times; Schiverta tends to be blunt and unfriendly, though I get the feeling she doesn't truly mean to be, and her defensive strategy seems to take away from her ability to land any good hits of her own; Nordauber is so focused on his magic that his flanks are almost always exposed, and his frigid demeanor makes him difficult to work with on a personal level, which I fear may hinder me as a leader in the future; Heilarzt seems to have very little tolerance for the people around him, and though I don't see that being a problem as a Medic (because my time in and out of military clinic tents has shown me that some patients can truly be stubborn fools of men, with whom only tough love has any effect), I do see it being a problem as the ace team's de facto leader, which was a position he seemed to just assume for himself despite my officially giving command to Nordauber - not to mention that he isn't built for combat, and so can't really deliver or take many hits without disastrous repercussions; and Nachtdol may not share the obsessive bloodlust of his fellow Nightseekers, but this is traded for a very sarcastic attitude which tends to come back to him. Violently. Aside from that, he - like all Nightseekers - is built lightweight, for quick and precise guerrilla ambush-and-retreat attacks, not open combat. As a result, when he is out in the open for long periods, his frailty rears its ugly head, and his speed fails him, which come together in a horrible harmony of pain for him.
I would never speak ill of my people without good reason, and based on what I've written here, compounded with the many complaints I receive from Heilarzt, I have plenty of good reasons. In fact, Heilarzt recently relayed one incident to me about a prior mission that had greatly bothered him...
Tharsis, Saehrimnir Inn, 7 AM (Six days ago)
"Hey, captain? Are you free at the moment?" Heilarzt - the white-haired Medic - asked.
"I can always make time for my people's needs. What's wrong?" Baldory asked, gesturing to a seat.
"It's this damn team of idiots you- oh, uh, that was probably pretty blunt of me..." Heilarzt said, catching himself.
"Didn't stop you from being so candid in the Old Mine. And I like to think that I come from a similar enough background as you all to be able to speak with you informally, if it makes confiding in me any easier. By all means, don't hold back on my account," Baldory said.
"Oh, good. Because those jackasses are really starting to get on my nerves, and I don't know how much longer I can stay in the group," Heilarzt griped.
"Care to explain?" Baldory asked.
"Well, you know how you sent us to go map out the Valley Springs to the east of the Lush Woodlands?" Heilarzt asked.
"I do indeed. I also recall that I got some rather foul looks from Aubatilde and her lot for it," Baldory replied.
"Heh heh, you could almost see the steam coming off her- a...anyway," Heilarzt said, "It's about that. We were able to complete the map."
"...But?" Baldory inquired.
"But, it didn't exactly go well..." Heilarzt replied.
Valley Springs, 7 AM (eight days ago)
"It's kind of a bummer the captain isn't coming with us on these missions anymore," the Landsknecht, a young woman with orange-blonde hair named Armelas, said.
"Eh, he wasn't really all that good anyhow. I mean, he did okay, but at least I didn't get all my limbs broken," Heilarzt said with a shrug.
"...Oh. Well. I'll be sure to take your criticism into consideration, then," Baldory said flatly.
"I didn't mean anything by it, I was just being honest!" Heilarzt said defensively.
"Just continue with your story," Baldory sighed.
"Sheesh, sensitive, much?" Heilarzt muttered. "Anyhow..."
"Captain Baldory is as new to the idea of leading a guild as we are to the concept of being a part of it," Nordauber, the Runemaster from before, spoke up. His voice was gentle, but emotionless, as he idly brushed one of his shoulder-length golden locks behind his ear. "It is unfair of us to judge him when he is trying to gain his footing on unfamiliar ground."
"Yeah, what frosty said," Schiverta, the lady Fortress with short blonde hair, said. "Besides, he took a hit that probably would've killed me and only suffered broken limbs from it as a result, so I'm really in the guy's debt."
"...I would thank you to no longer refer to me as 'frosty'," Nordauber requested.
"Sure thing, frosty," Schiverta replied.
Nordauber let out a quiet, but long sigh.
"Am I the only one who thinks it's hot out here?" Armelas asked.
"Monsters," Nachtdol, who had been quiet throughout the conversation, spoke up suddenly.
"No, I asked if it was hot-" Armelas objected.
"No, damn it, monsters!" Nachtdol snapped, shoving Armelas to the ground as a large frog flew through the air where she had been standing.
"What the hell was that f- GAH!" Armelas yelped, mid-rant, as she scrambled to her feet and drew her sword.
"See, when I say 'monsters,' that's your cue to get the hell out of the way of whatever I'm saying 'monsters' about," Nachtdol snapped.
"Because that's good team coordination," Baldory said, shaking his head.
"Right? It made me almost regret calling you out for getting wasted when you were with us that one time," Heilarzt replied.
"...Gee. Thanks. Thanks a bunch. I'm so touched," Baldory grumbled.
"So anyways..." Heilarzt continued.
"Die die die die die die die die DIE!" Armelas cried as she stabbed the twitching corpse of the gigantic frog repeatedly, finally stopping and breathing heavily after the twentieth time.
"...Pretty sure it's dead now," Heilarzt said.
"Shit, even I don't get that crazy over killing things," Nachtdol remarked.
"You don't get crazy over killing things," Nordauber clarified.
"It's true," Nachtdol confirmed.
"That had better be the last frog I have to deal with today!" Armelas snapped. "They're so icky..."
"Well, you're gonna be disappointed, then," Schiverta said, nodding in the direction of a large group of the frogs slowly hopping their way towards the group.
"Hey, Nachtdol, don't Nightseekers have the ability to paralyze things? Can't we just immobilize them and have easy pickings?" Heilarzt asked hopefully.
"You put far too much faith in this paralysis poison," Nachtdol replied, holding up a nearly-empty vial. "What you don't see is how much I needed to deal with that frog from before."
"...Seriously." Heilarzt blinked in disbelief.
"Listen, Medic-boy, if you think you've got a more perfected formula for a highly unstable paralysis poison, then by all means, I'll put you in front of the chemistry equipment and let you prove me an idiot. Until then, shut up and be glad I have anything on me at all," Nachtdol growled, glaring at Heilarzt, who rolled his eyes.
"How many frogs do you wager you can paralyze before the vial runs dry?" Nordauber asked.
About then, a much bigger scorpion dropped from a tree nobody was paying attention to beside the group.
"Decidedly less than I wish I had to deal with this guy," Nachtdol replied, his eye twitching.
"...It wasn't strange to see Deathstalkers in the Valley Springs, it was just... Well... We were less than well-prepared to deal with one right just then, you know?" Heilarzt explained.
"We were equally as ill-equipped to fight two baboons at the Old Mine. Yes, I believe I understand completely," Baldory replied.
"Oh good, you know where I'm coming from. So, then we actually get to fighting, right? And we're dealing with those frogs first, and you know you can't just deal with the frogs and expect the freaking scorpion to stay out of it, so..." Heilarzt continued.
"Gah! My legs! I can't move!" Armelas shouted, as the strike of the Deathstalker's stinger locked up the muscles in her legs.
"Move your shield in front of the Landsknecht, I need to get an antidote-!" Heilarzt tried to say to Schiverta, whom he was crouched behind.
Suddenly, a loud crack rang out through the air, and Nachtdol's limp body was sent flying from the Deathstalker's tail slap, rolling somewhere on the ground behind Nordauber, who was finishing off the last of the frogs with carefully placed ice spikes through the abdomens.
"Did... Did Nachtdol just die?! Nachtdol just freaking died, didn't he?!" Heilarzt asked in shock.
Schiverta grunted as she absorbed the blow of the Deathstalker's tail against her shield. "...Yeah, pretty sure he did."
"Damn it..." Heilarzt grumbled as he sprang to his feet and ran to Nachtdol's corpse.
"Wait, did you just say that Nachtdol was killed in action? He looked surprisingly alive to me when you all came back," Baldory interrupted.
"The nice thing about the medical trade is that we've developed these wonderful little tonics called 'Nectars' which negate the effects of death. That's about all they do, though, and you wake up still mostly dead until your wounds are properly healed, but at least you can go to a pub later and get free drinks by bragging to your buddies about how you came back to life because you thought the afterlife was boring," Heilarzt explained.
"Hmm. I'll have to keep that in mind," Baldory muttered. "In any event, shall we continue?"
"Ow!" Nachtdol yelped as Heilarzt's hand brushed a bruise on his shoulder.
"Oh, quit bitching, at least you're alive," Heilarzt muttered as he continued to wrap Nachtdol's arm.
"So because I'm not dead anymore means I'm not allowed to be in pain? What sense does that make?" Nachtdol snarled.
"The kind of sense where whining will make me hurt you worse if you don't shut up, that's what," Heilarzt replied.
"I was dead, how much more pain can I be in after that?" Nachtdol snorted.
"Oh trust me, death is easy compared to some of the medical sins I've seen and read about," Heilarzt said.
Armelas came back to the campfire and tossed on another log - night had fallen by the time the fight was over, and Nordauber had made the suggestion that the team set camp for the night and hell their wounds, rather than try and press on with their injuries. Nobody had heard him say it, however, and to his unexpressed annoyance, when Heilarzt said it again, everybody credited him for smart thinking.
When Armelas dropped the log into the fire, sparks shot out in everybody's faces, causing the group to flinch.
"Hey, watch it! I'm not trying to flambé these things, I'm just trying to fry them!" Schiverta shook her head and turned the makeshift spit again.
"What're you making?" Armelas asked.
"Please tell me it's not frog legs..." Nachtdol muttered.
"It's frog legs," Schiverta replied.
"Great. Terrific. Now I'm going to have a stomachache along with all my injuries," Nachtdol griped.
"Well, you can just deal with it. You eat what I cook, or you go hungry. I'm pretty sure that's not a hard choice to make," Schiverta fired back.
"I have to eat frogs, now...?" Armelas asked, looking rather green.
"Actually, I heard frogs taste like chicken," Heilarzt offered.
"Oh, great! Now I can never eat chicken again!" Armelas wailed.
"...I think the legs are burning," Nordauber said.
"What? Oh, shit!" Schiverta said as she noticed how blackened the frog legs had become.
"Did anybody bring something else? I don't wanna eat that," Armelas whined.
"Hey, hey, it's fine! Just peel the burnt part off and you don't even notice it happened!" Schiverta said victoriously, munching on the let she had grabbed.
Armelas lurched, clutching at her gut and covering her mouth.
"If you're gonna lose your shit, go do it somewhere else," Schiverta said flatly.
"The next day, we finished off the rest of the map, had a scuffle with a really big deer - it wasn't anything horrible, Armelas just got confused and thought that Schiverta was the deer because it knocked out her equilibrium during the fight. No worries, Schiverta didn't get hurt - and after that, we decided to come back here. But long story short, I can barely handle these assholes. It feels like I'm the straight man in a group of jokers," Heilarzt claimed.
Baldory coughed into his hand pointedly.
"Alright, so maybe Nordauber is kind of decent, too. And I guess Schiverta makes up for her bad cooking by being a halfway decent shield when I need one... And Armelas is dependable, if nothing else... And, uh, I guess Nachtdol's not half bad either..." Heilarzt's voice for quieter with each statement, until he was rendered silent by his own revelations.
For a moment, Baldory and Heilarzt sat quietly, staring at each other.
"...Well, they're still assholes, but I guess I can keep working with them for now," Heilarzt said finally, and as he stood up, he added, "Thanks, Cap, good talk."
Baldory blinked once after Heilarzt left the room.
"...Uh. Sure? But I didn't do anything," he said to the empty room.
Tharsis, Saehrimnir Inn, 3 AM (present)
Ultimately, whatever poor qualities the ace team has are vastly outweighed by their more stellar ones. While I suspect I may have complications with them in the future, I feel that they will be minor enough to not pose any great threat to the mission as a whole. I mean, much as I dislike hearing that I was the weak link in a situation, Heilarzt is fairly spot-on: my presence in the group didn't really add anything that was lost when Nachtdol took my place. Maybe I was able to keep them better in line, but if that's the only thing I provided to the team, then that's hardly a detriment to them to not have. Frankly, I think they benefit from such freedom - back when I was a knight, my platoon operated better when we were allowed to be our honest selves in heated situations like that. We were a chaotic mess, certainly, but we were a chaotic mess who managed to pull through in the end. We saw the good, the bad, the strange and the mundane of every man we fought beside, and we knew that somebody wanted that man to come home to them, so we did our level best to ensure it, and failure weighed on us heavily. If every person was like a marionette, with their strings attached to the hand of a puppeteer who did not abide any differing opinions from the status quo, I feel that combat scenarios would be far more bloody than they are - when you don't have any emotional connection to the people around you, you don't really care as much when they are felled; just call in the next puppet and keep going. That frightens me, that there are people like that out there, and I should hope that my men and I never become those people.
With that said, however, I did feel that I needed to take greater measures to get the team to work together more fluidly. After all, I suffered a death in my ranks, and though these Nectars that Heilarzt informed me of did their duty in bringing Nachtdol back from death's door - a resource I sadly never knew and now wish had existed back when I was a knight, as it would have saved many more lives than were lost, perhaps even preserving my family's honor at home - I would rather that such resources not see too much use in the future. And for that to happen, I realized that I would have to spend more time training my people in and out of their respective groups, so that they could properly feel each other out and see where they stood. Efforts in that regard have been slow-going, but progressing in a positive direction, I believe, what with this only having been about a week since that incident. If we are allowed to remain a part of the Yggdrasil mission, I have a good feeling that they will continue improving. Time will tell, right?
Baldory yawned silently into his free hand, and realized that he was more tired than he first thought. Deciding that what he had written would suffice, he put away the notebook and pen, turned out the desk lamp, and dragged himself into his bed. He was asleep before hee could loft his legs into the bed, and so slept in an awkward, slumped pose.
The door to Bernoryn's suite opened slowly, and the innkeeper peeked her head in. She had been secretly sitting outside the room, waiting for Baldory to go to sleep. Though it wasn't her business to pry, she couldn't quench her curiosity, and the urge to learn more about Bernoryn was killing her.
The innkeeper crept into the room as quietly as she could, and opened the desk drawer carefully, taking Baldory's notebook out. She then crept back out of the room and to her office, where she proceeded to read what Baldory had written thus far.
"...Well, his handwriting is lovely," she mused to herself as she continued reading.
It was like an epic poem to her. Every word of Baldory's report that she read, her emotions cycled through. Some parts enchanted her; some infuriated, in particular the part about Heilarzt's commentary about Baldory; and some words saddened her, like those which described the reason for Baldory's presence in Tharsis. Before she knew it, she had reached the end of what he had written presently, and after a quiet moment to herself, she sighed deeply.
"Sounds like the Outland Count's mission is a lot for him and his guild to handle. I hope they can pull through, they seem like a promising group for this," the innkeeper said to herself. "Maybe I should make them something special before they set to work later in today..."
With this thought in mind, the innkeeper crept back up to the Bernoryn suite and returned Baldory's notebook to the desk drawer he had stowed it in, then went to need herself. She was going to have to be up bright and early for the guilds, and she wouldn't be in any shape to do any work if she wore herself out.