New title: Rogue Awakenings - A D&D tale
Original title: Rude Awakening - The Gallows' Calling.
© Andre Michael Pietroschek.
The story is written in storyteller mode, semi-omniscient, and includes some knowledge the readers otherwise would not be able to know. My goal is to add more show don't tell and searching to reconnect with the passion I once had to write this. Originally, the player who inspired me to write Emin had a problem with this idea. Years later, that changed. Sadly, I only had the audio script remaining, so this story will have some grammar issues AND I may or may not write the parts aka ventures 3 and 4 of it. Part 2 will be inserted into this once I had time to run it through proofreading & do written grammar basics on the audio script.
The Roleplay Tale begins:
Venture One - Cryptic Surprises
In a dark room, a cloaked humanoid silhoutte moves on the ground. Slowly moving both hands along the skull, the throat, and the then the body, as if checking for wounds. Slowly rising from prone position into a crouch on knees and hands, the figure fetches a leather band from a pocket, removes the cloak, wraps the leather around his eyes and knots them at the back of the head. Thereafter, looking around, he crawls toward a second but smaller figure prone on the ground some steps away. Still crouched, the first figure moves its head, as if inspecting the stocky second figure for a while.
`Emin, wake up! Seems, we were knocked out in the last fight!´, said Bumley.
The room still was deeply in accursed darkness, only his years of living the dungeoneer way of life had trained Bumley to not lose orientation. The rustling of cloth, leather, and chain armor was all Bumley could hear at the moment. The stocky fellow also started checking himself for wounds and lost equipment, it seemed.
`Me head spins like an orc skull bashed with a warhammer.´, said the smaller, stocky fellow, who therefore must be Emin.
`Remember the plan, we snatch what we can get, then get the hell outta here!´, said Bumley.
`The guild will sure not grant us the black cloak for this failure.´, grumbled Emin.
`A guild that did send us after a necromancer, convinced we could just sneak into a crypt, acquire his wand and spellbook, and have the undead menace neutralized. Forget those fools!´, hissed Bumley.
`Loot-sack of mine is quite full, if that is a hint you may need. Maybe, we triggered a trap instead of going down in a fight?´, wondered Emin, the materialist crypt explorer.
`Dwarven stubbornness. A loot sack, I told you a messenger bag is so much better, albeit smaller. It looks inconspicuous to guards, is practical, can be stitched and reinforced by skill, and allows to run or fight on the job.´, lectured Bumley.
`Go, whine in some elven whores' arms!´, countered Emin.
`Nay, we follow the plan! That means, our plan, not the guild's idiocy.´, insisted Bumley.
The two hooded figures cautiously moved toward the doorway, weapons drawn.
`I hear not a thing.´, said Emin.
`Same to my ears.´, replied Bumley.
Raising his head one notch, the dwarven thief sniffed the air.
`Smells rotten though.´, whispered Emin.
`Yeah, blame the Undead, it still could be the harlot you hugged last night.´, dared Bumley.
Upholding a holy symbol, worn like an amulet around his neck, Emin studied the corridor deep in the darkness. Eery silence and faint wind in the distance built the only sound to hear.
`I know this built of a crypt. There are stairs to get us out, follow along!´, proclaimed Emin.
`Aye.´, replied Bumley.
The two rogues sneaked towards the supposed exit of the crypt, slow movements speaking of practice in stealth actions. Instances later they came up the stairs, arriving on a small, stone-built graveyard. Getting a dozen steps away from the crypt, Bumley looks at something obscured by a gravestone.
`Seen it?´, inquired Bumley.
`Corpse of our guild's nanny left as a feast for crows.´, assured Emin.
Unspoken, but true, the surprising death of a guild supervisor, so incompetent he, or she, was easy fodder for the hungry dead, turned the suspicion of Bumley, about the guild being not worth it, into a more factual estimation.
Both rogues started their notorious rogue's grin. A dangerously obvious, slim smile of the triumphant scoundrel, real or imagined, when it was about the triumph being factual or spiritual.
`That guild IS bad karma. We leave for dead.´, said Bumley.
Pointing toward trees on the horizon, Emin faces Bumley anew.
`Jenna would sure be happier, when we bring her a boar or some rabbits, instead of merely our personal presence.´, came the words from Emin.
`Yes, I will beg for nature's guidance on that kinda fee to pay. Pray, once we are away from this accursed graveyard.´, said Bumley.
`We cannot go public smelling like gravediggers and corpse-huggers.´, added Emin.
`There is a pond I know of, close by, and sufficient moonlight to get ourselves cleaned up.´, said Bumley.
Still cautious and distrustful of the seemingly peaceful calm oft-encountered after the bloodshed, the two rogues moved with weapons drawn. Bumley wielded a rune-inscribed, spiked buckler and a short blade, while Emin preferred a pistol crossbow and his mace (full metal cudgel), which had the same symbol inscribed, as his amulet.
Finding their way back to the fence that surrounded the burial area, they made it back out, directly heading towards the outline of trees.
`It is different to sneak through forests.´, said Emin.
`Yes. Holy ground to our ancestors. Some still is.´, said Bumley.
`Witches, Shamans, and Druids living with animals, some say the first elves came from the spiritual union of man and beast kinda love.´, said Emin.
`Dangerous simplification! Remember that some of us really were there. It's like with your dwarven ancestors, lots of tales, falsehoods, and truism, mixed or confused now and then.´, replied Bumley.
Contrary to commoners' cliche both of them were roguish in their faith. Emin never preached about his deity and Bumley never attempted to show anyone the beauty and power of nature's divine aspects either.
But all of that was forgotten when the deceptively consistent moonlight shone down on what they watched in the pond, the small lake of water, that night. Seemingly dumbstruck and perplexed, the both of them fell unto their behinds, still staring into the water.
For what they beheld was not their well-known mortal forms, but instead the clearly undead variant of themselves!
`My beard!´, shrieked Emin.
Emin, formerly a dwarven specimen, now resembled a Wight. His skin was an unnatural, chalky white and his one hair visible were his eyebrows and a matte-blackened beard that looked like a zombified mockery of the original dwarven pride. At the same time, the larger rogue also twitched and gagged while staring into the pond.
`Next date is the reaper, sweety.´, mocked Bumley, staring at his own mirror image.
Bumley looked ghoulish, with a belly now shaking its wax-like, utterly unhealthy fat. Plus claws and fangs of the gluttonous undead.
After a long while of handling their individual shock, they spoke again.
`On the good side, it could mean celestial management wants us to do a job for them?´, stated Bumley. `Slim chance that our mere faith resisted necromancy and a nap on unholy ground.´
The duo looked at each other for a moment, as words proverbially sank in.
`Or that necromancer comes back one day, bossing us around, as his newly acquired lackeys.´, concluded Emin.
`And Jenna thought me ugly DURING my lifetime.´, joked Bumley.
`Well, you sure ain't the comely bard type who she longs for!´, stated Emin.
`Aye. I do not even have my own undead wight-beard like Sir Dwarf does!´, retaliated Bumley.
The rogues struggled with shock, and only the fact that both of them had at least basic training in a more spiritual form of militant faith, had bolstered them against those knockbacks by life.