Disclaimer:Nope, I don't own Camelot, Golden Sun, or Nintendo. I wish I did.
Chapter Five:Garet the Gambler
Bust! How could I bust? How much am I down now? Oh, Mars…
Garet looked at the Blackjack deck in disgust. How could it betray him at such a crucial moment? His look of disgust turned to horror as he realized what was going to happen.
What am I going to do? I don't have twenty grand!
He looked around at his opponents, so happy, doing what they loved – making money. Garet did the only thing he could do. And the one thing he shouldn't have. He jumped up, fistful of fire, and yelled out, "Garet is leaving the building!" and threw the fireball down on the table as hard as he could, effectively breaking it in two. Conjuring up two more fireballs, he threw them, and watched as they flew around in circles, trapping those who would hinder his escape.
And escape he did. Running out the door, he shouted, "yippee-kai ya!' and stepped out into the sun. Sprinting down the street, dodging pedestrians, he hid down in a man-hole.
You see, Tarince is not the kind of place you want to mess with. In the short time since its founding, it has gained the same reputation as Lunpa, except that instead of thieves, there are angry gamblers who kill people who don't pay their tabs.
Since his friend's death, Garet had spent his days here, in the local casinos, taverns, and sleazy inns, gambling his life's savings away. In this town, there were already dirty streets, grimy buildings, dangerous back alleys, and bathroom graffiti.
Tarince had been founded shortly before the fall of Mt. Aleph. It had been intended as a way-point between Vale and Kalay, a clean, safe place for travelers. The founder had since gone to live in Xian.
Sliding down further into the sewer, Garet lit a fireball, the better to see with. He knew these sewers dumped out near Vale, in an already polluted lake deep in the mountains. He planned on walking the entire length, and to meet up with Jenna and Ivan and Sheba for the first time since Isaac's funeral.
Walking, he noticed the rock that had been used in construction. It was a corn-yellow, and oddly smooth. Garet had been told that not only did it look decent, but it was amazingly cheap.
His steps echoed throughout the tunnels, and he wouldn't have been surprised if his pursuers would find him any second, assuming they knew he had come down here. Of course, he could hear them just as easily.
He walked for hours, passing rat nests, seemingly belonging to beasts gargantuan in stature. Garet hoped to Alchemy he wouldn't run across one. Unfortunately, he did.
The beast hulked over Garet by about 5 inches, and had a coat tinged purple, with spots of dried, red-brown spots. He had great long, yellow teeth, each roughly the length of a machete. The creature apparently didn't care about its hygiene, and drooled and dribbled and spit all down its front, dripping off his teeth, falling on its feet.
Garet drew Apollo's Axe, bracing for the beast to jump on him, to rip him apart, to curse him with its indefinitely bad breath!
But it didn't. It turned around. It – no, she, tended to her nest, with five young rats nestled, curled into little balls. If they hadn't been so ugly, they'd have been cute.
Garet continued to Vale, encountering nothing more hostile than that pungent smell of sewer.