Companion For A Day, Romantic Interest For A Lifetime... and beyond
(by WitchWolf)
A dark-haired ranger looked at the bottom of his mug. Few more drinks, and the mug would likely return the stare. He was looking forward to it. If he was going to have to go through yet another round of that –and there was no doubt in his tortured mind that he will be forced to do so very soon- than at least he could do it drunk. It wouldn't make it any more bearable of course, but he fervently hoped it would at least make him pass out half way through it and snore though the rest in blissful, drunken ignorance. Sadly, according to the man across him, that never worked.
Now, "trust" wasn't one of the common words in Bishop's dictionary, but in this particular case, the other man had his complete trust and, uncharacteristically for the sour ranger, even a tinge of sympathy. After all, the poor bloke had been in this mess for far longer than he.
"Four years you say…" his voice trailed off in some sort of amazed horror.
The other man nodded sullenly, swirling whatever liquid he had in his own mug (Abyssal Schnapps, as he later explained, was courtesy of the local CPS staff member with a really soft heart and really hard contacts in the lower planes).
"More or less," he said and quickly downed his drink in one gulp as a sort of punctuation; as if the words themselves tasted foul in his mouth and he was hoping to wipe the taste off with something even fouler. If even Abyssal Finest could possibly taste fouler than that.
"How…?" the ranger looked at him with near-desperate expression, his voice barely a above a whisper.
The tiefling shook his head and waved a hand in general direction of the bar: a heavy old thing that had probably seen (and likely, been used in) more bar brawls than the tiefling and the ranger put together; it had its own collection of blotches and stains, some of which probably counted as mini-primordial soups by now. It also sported an assortment of relatively clean mugs, a not-so-clean bar-cloth and, at the other end of the last item listed, a definitely tired-looking CPS staff member who was, at the time, industriously pouring her own daily dose of sanity down her throat.
Seeing Valen's gesture and misinterpreting it as a request for more drink, she leaned over the bar, wrapped her fingers around the first bottle-like thing she found and in one fluid movement sent it flying towards their table. The "fluidness" of the movement generally consisted of fine line of unidentified fluid pouring out of the uncorked end during the brief flight, but since most of the contents were still inside at the end of the trip and the bottle had the decency not to break even after both Valen and Bishop failed to catch it, neither of the men complained.
"Elves, mostly…" the tiefling slurred, "Half-elves, an odd human or two…" He democratically split the remaining contents of the bottle between the two mugs, not really bothering to check if they were yet empty or not. "But no dwarves. Definitely no dwarves." He smiled apologetically at the dwarf female who had just delivered the bottle. "No offence meant, my lady-Ugh!" He bit his tongue, but not fast enough. He growled in frustration. The damned line was by now carved so deeply into his vocal routine he wondered how long it would be before he addressed even Bishop as "My Lady". He shuddered at the notion. Well, at least he could keep enough presence of mind not to start with "Yes, my love?" again. Or at least, he hoped so. Desperately.
The dwarf chuckled and gave both men a tired grin. "None taken, hon. We all know how dwarves, gnomes and hobbits –let alone half-orcs- are just not… " she said the next word with disgust, "…pretty enough to make it into those kinds of stories. Certainly, not as lead characters and I, for one, am grateful to whatever powers there are that that is so." And she meant it, too – she'd have taken it a personal insult to all dwarvenkind if she ever ran across one of her kin in that embarrassing a role.
"It's not that I mind any of it," Valen informed the world in general, "I am a planar for Abyss' sake! What do I care for aesthetic standards of some backwater Prime? Bah…" He took a swig from his new-filled mug and tried not to choke too hard. Abyssal Schnapps was an acquired taste, but with the addition of whatever he just poured into it, the taste suddenly became reminiscent of something one could use to unclog a goblin drainage ditch.
Across the table, Bishop bravely swallowed from his own mug and nodded, but not too hard in case his head decided to unscrew itself and take the rest of the night off.
"Elves and half-elves. Yeah, that seems to be my lot, too," he grumbled, then squeezed his eyes shut, trying to deflect the onslaught of images –all of them invariably of pretty elfin girls he wouldn't touch with a ten foot pole when sober or a wet bar cloth when drunk but desperately wished to plant at least three arrows through their backs, drunk or sober. At this point, the sight of a dwarf woman at the bar looked almost serene.
"And they're all rangers, dammit!" he hissed angrily. "Unless they're bards, of course. Or," and there was a particularly nasty streak of venom in his voice now, "paladins," he spat. "As if one weren't enough already," he finished, poking his thumb over the shoulder towards a small and remarkably clean tavern table where one solemn figure silently drank, prayed, or both.
"Shut up, Bishop." The voice was quiet and deep and in any other circumstance involving it's owner and a certain ranger it would have sounded threatening, too. This time though, it sounded more like the words came out of habit than out of anything else. Except, possibly, out of one very tired paladin's throat. Strangely enough, not drunk as well. At the far side of the bar, the dwarf grinned.
Paladins, she thought, though unlike the ranger, she never put the annoying accent on the first syllable of the word. After having spent a good chunk of her life under the same roof with one, Dorna learned a thing or two about them and overall, developed a rather low opinion of the lot. Having spent some time around Casavir, she begun thinking that perhaps not all of them were as bad, or at least that Casavir wasn't. if nothing else, the man could hold down his drink.
Paladins, by the very nature of their calling, tended to be lawful, orderly and generally sober. The trick to being all those things at once and still retain some semblance of sanity was to develop a good stomach for drink early on in the career. She learned that a while ago, after waking up under the table, wondering what in the Nine Hells was going on and where did the top of her head go, only to find the table full of neatly stacked empty mugs and the paladin she was planning to outdrink several hours ago already gone.
Chuckling to herself, she poured another one and turned her attention back to the ongoing conversation.
"Paladins, nothing," Casavir scoffed, his face a mixture of agitation and downright disgust. He half-turned in his chair and, leaning on his elbow, looked over his shoulder at two other men. "If they are paladins, so is Bishop."
Bishop made a grunting noise that indicated that he was: 1) disgusted at the mere suggestion, 2) was going to pound Casavir to the ground one of these days for that remark… if he could be bothered to do so, but that 3) he generally agreed with the statement. It was amazing how much could that man say in just one grunt.
Valen's eyes flickered from one man to another and he, too, nodded his agreement on the subject at hand. If they claimed to be paladins, it was invariably the sort that was slightly tomboyish, a bit (or a lot) prankier than any paladin was expected to be and with a particular "bright-pink-over-blind-eyes" outlook on the world that no paladin worth his salt ever had. Not unless he was blind, deaf and dead, anyway. There was no rule that said paladins, too, couldn't crack jokes but he felt there bloody well should be a rule forbidding them to be complete idiots.
The tiefling looked at Bishop for a moment. There was no force in the world that would ever convince him that "paladin" wasn't a synonym for "idiot" to begin with but even Bishop agreed on one occasion that there were paladins and then there were paladins. Casavir was the real item – in Bishop's eyes, something he could genuinely hate on simple basis that he was his exact opposite. But the kind of paladins these three men had to deal with most of the time…
Valen sighed. Trying to decide if it was Casavir or Bishop who had it worse with thatsort of 'paladin' was probably the sort of mental gymnastics better left for times in which he didn't have half a keg of Abyssal readying another tidal wave over his brain.
"Strange, though," the tiefling mused, "I think I only had one Weaponmaster to deal with in all this time and that one wasn't actually bad at all."
Lucky fucker, he heard Bishop mutter.
"Well, at least there's two of you," Valen waved his mug at them carelessly, sending few drops of Abyssal spraying on the table and the floor where they promptly sizzled and died in a puff of smoke. "I have to put up with all of them by myself."
The other two exchanged venomous glances that suggested they didn't see each other's company as that big of a blessing.
"It's still me who gets to take the brunt of it," the ranger sulked menacingly. Few weeks ago, he probably would have added something acidic as arrows along the lines of that at least proving once and for all who was a better looker (hells, better everything) of the two of them…but somehow, those words soon turned to be far more double edged then he liked.
"Better you than me," Casavir grinned in one of the rare displays of malice the paladin allowed himself occasionally. Bishop shot him a caustic glare, yet didn't reach for his bow to shoot something else at him as well. Just holding a mug and finding his lips with it two times out of three was enough to keep his hands fully occupied right now.
Valen looked at the pair oddly as a particularly unnerving thought wormed it's way through his brain. Being here longer than anyone else, he heard quite a few rumors from the staff, including those from Harry Potter section as well as those from the larger branch of Forgotten Realms section of which NWN was just a sub-branch. He didn't even want to think about Harry Potter, and the FR branch seemed to have this assassin and this drow ranger hauled in so often the two begun considering the facility their second, if not their first home by now.
"Well," he begun reluctantly, "At least you two haven't been stuck in a…"
The two looked at him unblinkingly in a sort of befuddled horror: not sure what he was trying to say but sure as hell it bode nothing good for them. Valen bit his lip nervously, fishing for words.
"You know... that thing you get from knives and swords, only not really knives and swords and you don't call it "cut" but that other word instead..." his voice trailed off as two men caught his unspoken thoughts and the look of sheer dread spread across their faces in unison.
"Aaaactually…" Dorna piped in from her corner and was immediately awarded with the sight of two hardened warriors about to whimper like week-old puppies. With a side order of arrow shower and a Smite Evil gratis. She usually didn't get her kicks out of disturbing this lot further than they already were, but she simply couldn't let this one slip past her.
"No, no, it's ok," she waved her hands at the shocked pair, having found some mercy in her heart after all. "From what I've seen, it's just a parody, so it's all right."
The two men relaxed visibly. It was true – parodies didn't count; they never claimed to be serious and in-character to begin with, so that made them quite bearable to be in. Occasionally.
The three men retreated to somber silence for a while, trying to drown out whatever dreadful images they've been left with after their latest torments. Only a few times, Valen had told the other two, had he been given a privilege ofnot being forced to fall madly in love with the protagonist of the story. Once or twice, it happened that there were male leads on set and as far as he could remember they were, on the whole, all right. But that only came after a year or so and neither Casavir nor Bishop were certain at this point that they could ever hold out that long. But worse than that, they were scared shitless that they would. Valen, for his part, remembered the only instance in which the main was a female he was not forced to court, and that one was, to put it bluntly, a homicidal maniac who could give even Bishop a run for his money; but even that seemed a preferable option to the general trend of things.
"Well," Dorna said and jumped down from her chair, "That's it for me, guys. Gotta run – doing a double shift tonight." The men nodded and watched her go. Dorna had been a more recent addition to the CPS crew and actually worked only part-time for the NWN branch here. Right now, she was rotating shifts with another staff member from FR section and only popped down to "The Refuge" –as the tavern in the basement of CPS HQ was aptly named- on rare occasions she managed to take few hours off.
For the next fifteen minutes or so, the three men drank in silence, each suffused in their own private hells of nightmares past and nightmares yet to come. Until a grin approached them.
Like a Cheshire Cat inversed, only after a moment or two did the rest of the face materialize behind the grin as it's owner stealthily padded across the floor and towards the three near-neurotic heaps of misery.
"Well, well…" the grin's owner chuckled softly and leaned into the shadows and on the table behind him as three pairs of eyes met his own. "That bad, eh?" It was more a statement than a question.
"No. It's worse than that," Casavir muttered and turned his attention back to his drink, trying like hell to focus on seeing just one mug instead of two he was seeing in his hand but at the same time also trying to keep one weary, bleary eye trained on the newcomer. His effort merely caused his eyes to go cross, as he knew they would all along, but he just couldn't help himself: there was something in the very core of his paladin being that wouldn't allow him to take his eyes off any unsavory character in his vicinity even if he knew they posed no threat to him or universe at large. At the moment, anyway.
"Gand," Valen shook his head, "What in the Nine Hells are you doing down here?"
"Just dropped by for a quick drink," Aarin shrugged and, true to his statement, walked away and reached behind the counter in the same way Dorna had done some time ago. "And to see what state you sad lot are in," he added as he returned, his mug full of… whatever it was he had just helped himself to.
Valen squinted and shook his head again. Aarin Gand. During his first few months down here at CPS, Valen occasionally heard a rumor or three about some guy who preceded him but never really stayed around long. Based on what he had heard, the only mental picture Valen could possibly put together was that of a pathetic character with roguish tendencies, inclination to endlessly mope and whine about his dead-ex and overall is in possession of as much spine as could be found in an average invertebrate.
And like all mental pictures formed out of rumors alone, this one, too, proved to be completely wrong – a fact Valen was aware of the second he first laid his eyes on the black-skinned, dreadlocks-sporting man. Aarin Gand wasn't aspymaster for nothing and among his many talents was a huge talent for disguise. And disguise, as Valen had soon been informed, was much more than wearing different clothes and fake moustache. It was wearing a fake personality that really mattered in the job. And Aarin was damn good at it.
"Y'see," the spymaster had grinned at the distressed tiefling back when they first met, "It's simply a matter of making them loathe you instead of the other way around. You sit around, doing, to all appearances, nothing at all, and doing your damn best to look like a kicked puppy most of the time. Then you cook up some half-assed story about a dead-ex which may or may not be true, add some disgustingly mushy talk involving lots of words like 'lurve' and 'loss' and 'but of course there's no way I'm actually just trying to compensate for all that by courting you, no sir-e' and then just lay back and watch them scurry away like vermin from a sinking ship. And once you're sure they're well away from the deck, you just hoist the sails and bugger the hell out of there as fast as you can and get down to doing some real business instead."
It sounded so easy, the way Aarin had described it, but the thing was, you had to be Aarin Gand in order to pull it off. Valen had tried it once or twice but it turned a total disaster so nowadays, he was just generally glad, and more than just generally jealous, that one of them, at least, managed to escape the clutches of nightmarish stories they were relentlessly being pushed into every second week or so.
"Oh, perk up, you lot," Aarin said cheerfully. "Look, I brought you some company." Something about the way the rogue said it made all three men look up in an instant. Gand said nothing more. Instead, he just put on one of his customary grins again and waved to the other figure that shuffled into the inn behind him to come over and join the party, sad as the party was.
The moment the other man stepped out into the light an entire collection of emotions ranging from sympathy to relief and back stirred through the tortured trio chests. Lean, yet muscular, exotic to the bone and with a patch of hair falling across one eye in a way that would instantly make any anime fangirl squeak for joy and then go have a cold shower and two runs around the block, the man approaching their table clearly had "The Next Victim" sign painted all over him.
"Gannayev. Gann-Of-Dreams," the newcomer said as the way of introduction and slid into the unoccupied chair next to Gand. "Expansion," he added with a faint smile.
"Oh." Bishop experienced a fleeting sense of knowing this guy from somewhere. "A… hagspawn?" he muttered before even realizing what he had said and drawing a curious glance from Valen for it. How he had known the newcomers species was as much of a mystery to him as it was to the tiefling.
"Yes. Nice to see you too, Bishop. …I guess," the hagspawn replied. "You do look a bit better than the last time I saw you… " he frowned in slight puzzlement before adding "Or will see you, at any rate." he finished uncertainly.
Bishop's eyes widened in barely suppressed horror. "You mean, I will be in…"
"No," Gann cut him short, "Notexactly. You do get to show up, but you're dead already at the time. Stuck in the Wall of the Faithless," he added helpfully, "Being sucked in it and…"
"…not resisting it but in fact, enjoying every last damn moment of it," the two men finished in unison, one because he had seen it happen and the other riding the wave of pure hope: even in normal circumstances, Bishop would more-or-less welcome whatever oblivion had to offer in the end, but in these circumstances, oblivion as the means of escape seemed the best thing that could possibly happen bar being actually set free from it all without going through the inconvenience of dying first.
"Don't get your spirits up just yet," Gann waved a warning hand at the ranger. "Chances are, you'll be the first soul to be yanked out once Kaelyn (no, don't ask – long story) gets her crusade really up and running."
Bishop had the look of a man whose little Bluebird of Happiness just flew towards him but paused long enough only to crap on his head before merrily continuing on it's way.
"Sorry," Gann shrugged and lifted his drink.
The only answer Bishop gave was a quiet "Thud!" as his forehead connected with the table in front of him. Off to the side, the hagspawn could almost hear the question in Casavir's stare.
"Oh, you're off the hook, I think. Rocks crushed your back or something, nice and clean."
A huge sigh of relief burst out of paladin's chest. He'll still get yanked into the same nightmares as before but at least, he seemed free of having to go through the Expansion follow-ups as well. Unlike Bishop there. He could almost feel sorry for the ranger at that moment.
Almost.
"There, there," Aarin said soothingly, patting the shuddering ranger's back. "At least you'll have Gann here to share the burden from time to time."
Gann took one look at the ranger and wasn't so sure he actually wanted to but… it's not like he had much choice. In fact, the sole reason he was down here right now was because he wanted to be prepared for what was, sooner or later, most definitely coming to him as well. On the other hand, he mused, his own storyline wasn't half as bad as the others'; in fact, it was actually good with not nearly as much room for mucking it up as the others' had been so all in all, he could consider himself pretty lucky he realized.
"I'll… help if I can," he said slowly to the still-trembling ranger whose hope for salvation just cruelly fluttered out the window. "Oh, and thanks for the tip, by the way."
"What did I say?" the ranger mumbled, his head still firmly stuck to the table.
"If my memory serves me, something along the lines of 'Careful there, buddy – she jumps from man to man like abad case of pox'" Gann said in a remarkably good imitation of Bishop's drawl.
"I said that? Good. I wish I had said that to myself, too…"