The Butcher of Gadobhra

Lucas has outdone himself with his latest novel. Tinkers, Pirates and Troublemakers: The History of House Franklin paints a fascinating story that discloses some of the secrets of one of the oldest and strangest Founding Families who formed the Empire. House Franklin has given the Empire its most dashing rogues, shining heroes, strange crackpots, and most perplexing villains. While other authors have chronicled chapters of the Franklin history, only Lucas Lashwhip has told a story that takes us from the day when Harmonia Franklin stepped foot on the deck of her first ship all the way to the family's latest adventure when two junior couriers, Harmony and Ben the Seventh, rescued dozens of paladins from the threat of the Necro-Wolf.

-Available soon from Nile Books or in audio format as performed by the Bardic College on Friday nights at Bly's Tavern and Grill.

Harmonia backed away from Ben and turned to Harmony. "I made a mistake. After you told me of your adventures and meeting a new relation, I became suspicious. My investigations led me to suspect that Damien might be involved. I thought my suspicions were confirmed when Benjamin was resurrected in Franklin House, in Damien's room. I suspect this is the fault of the system. It delights in tricks like that. It may have placed him there because Ben was wearing Damien's signet ring. I thought Damien was up to his tricks again and decided to settle things with my sword. Luckily for all of us, your cousin is proficient in cheating."

Ben grinned. "No one ever expects you to bring a book to a sword fight."

"I was feeling guilty for almost killing an innocent man. That comment evaporated any of that feeling."

"Spend time with him, grandmother; you'll find he isn't so innocent. He'll fit in fine with the rest of the family. Just surviving a duel with you should prove that. Do I have a promise from the two of you that you'll talk this out and not start another duel? I can't stay to chaperone you."

"I was supposed to be on my way to the academy to pick up a special delivery that needs to be to Graymalkin by midnight. I'm already running late. I'm sure they'll believe me when I explain that I had to untie my ink-stained grandmother and catch a crafty assailant wandering through the old galleries. So, please behave, and I'll be back for a complete explanation tomorrow over breakfast."

"I think we can manage that; if not, there are more books and inkwells lying about." Ben took it as a good sign that Harmonia laughed. He'd gotten lucky once.

Harmony departed, giving both him and Harmonia a kiss on the cheek and a second warning about dueling. "If you must, go to the salon and get a judge."

Ben was more than happy to leave the room and go elsewhere. He felt like an imposter when standing next to the huge statue of himself.

"I looked for you but never found you, not on any of the oceans."

Ben sighed. "I screwed up. I underestimated the assholes I was working for on my last job. They sued me for the cost of all the stuff I tossed to the crowd, claiming lost revenue, and estimated the earnings at ten times the normal value. I was royally screwed. We settled for me doing a lot of jobs for them at half my normal rate. It tied me up until the end of EOQ2 and most of EOQ3. If it hadn't been for my friend Rolly loaning me money for rent and food, I probably wouldn't have made it."

Harmonia was sitting across from him at a table in a side parlor. After the shock of seeing Ben, she had changed back to what he assumed was her normal self. "I heard rumors of someone I thought might be you, but I wasn't sure and didn't want to leave the sea. I was still too young and learning the rules of acting correctly and fitting in with people. But I wondered about 'Quickfoot Ben, the scourge of the Mountain Barons' and 'Dead-eye Franklin, Lawman for Hire'; the descriptions fit you, but not well."

"Oh, lord, those were horrible roles. I was always the underdog in those stories, leading a group of 'plucky heroes.' The company setting up the adventures would fill my group with people of little skill and a lot of money, then ensure we won. We'd go up against two hundred outlaws who shot worse than stormtroopers. We only had to point a gun in their general direction and pull the trigger. Three bandits died for every bullet we shot in the air. But the rubes loved it, and I had to act out those adventures repeatedly."

"The only big role I got was the Siege of Orleans. I was playing 'Ragged Bennie,' a noble whose castle was burned by the English and who chose to live with the beggars and run the resistance in the small villages. The role was difficult. I looked hideous and smelled worse. But I had some fun. I worked with some friends on the inside. They gave me targets to hit, and I used that job to send group after group of rich assholes on suicide missions, causing havoc."

Harmonia looked intrigued. "You were Ragged Bennie? The descriptions said he was an ugly beggar surrounded by flies and dying of the plague!"

Ben got up and started staggering around the room; one arm held crookedly as if paralyzed, the other holding out a bowl. He coughed and whined in a horrid voice. "Alms? Alms for a poor dying soul? Please ma'am? Pay Ragged Bennie, and he'll go off to the other side of town and bother you no more."

He straightened and took a long sip of tea. "Hard to do that voice now that I'm not starving for food. I smelled so bad; I could hardly eat. I kept rotted sausage in my pockets and stuffed it in my sleeves with garbage to attract the flies and breed more. The funny thing was, everyone loved it. Ragged Bennie got run ragged doing two and three missions a day. By the end of it, I was emotionally drained. That was a hard one to lose."

Harmonia looked puzzled. "But your side won the Siege. Roland of Ebonmount brought the dragons. He completely routed the English."

Ben shook his head. "Rolly was too late. We managed to save Cardinal D'arctangeant but couldn't save the Maid of Orleans. Change of script based on paid voting. They burned her at the stake early. It just didn't matter much to me after that. All of us were so invested in the game at that point. We hadn't been out of our pods in a month and were going days without sleep in the game. It felt so real. Watching her die was real to us."

The table grew silent until Harmonia broke it. "Yes, that was not well done. I remember hearing arguments about it. Money was controlling the story, warping the plot. It made a mockery of things. The...developers...working on EOQ3 vowed not to let that happen again. The bigger stories were decided by those playing in them, not by outside money. There was pressure against the new direction. The game was becoming a huge platform for real-world money. You should take heart that the bad things that happened in the Siege led to changes."

Her eyes grew wide. "Wait...that explains some things. Harmony said you summoned the Maid! She came to your aid against the wolves. Dammit, the engine has noticed you. Probably as soon as you started playing."

Ben was confused. "The engine? The Genesis Engine? Is it a real thing? It's such a confusing name for a game, and very little explanation from Wally."

She laughed. "Oh, it's real. It generates stories and looks for connections between events. It constantly feeds the system tidbits of information and assigns quests to nudge things along paths. It can be subtle as a spring breeze or blunt as a hammer. Tossing you into Damien's room may have been its work."

"So I've been manipulated?"

"No, more like nudged. Think back to the affair of the necro-wolf. Harmony told me what she knew of the story. You healed her with a prayer?"

Ben thought back to that night. "Not quite. There was an old Inquisitor, I was begging him to heal Harmony, but no one had any mana. I had almost 1400 mana but no spell to use with it. He used an old method to help me channel my power. Oh, shit! He asked me if I prayed to any god. And then I used all my power at once..."

Harmony nodded. "And the maid appeared."

Ben was trying to remember. "Not quite...first, the storm started to change, and the wind blew my hat into the fire. Ozzy had given me a phoenix feather to put into it, and I think that triggered something."

Harmony rolled her eyes. "A phoenix feather, a wounded companion, under siege by evil undead, your unfilled desire to save the Maid of Orleans, a burst of considerable power, and fervent prayer. I'd have been surprised if the engine didn't take notice." She drummed her fingers on the table. "But the resurrection of a demi-goddess is no small matter."

Ben was confused. "So, she's real?"

Harmony said softly. "She is now. Especially for you. So interesting. And the affair of the fallen angel involved you as well. Has anything else strange happened to you or those around you?"

Ben snorted. "Strange and unusual is just another day in Sedgewick."

Harmonia smiled, the same smile Ben had seen years ago when she looked like a skinny teenager. He tried to focus on how she was there and now here. "But I'm missing something. How did a player in EOQ2 become the head of House Franklin in Genesis? Are you some type of admin or game developer?"

"That's an easy way to describe me. Think of me as a part-time game developer. But I wasn't always one. When we first met, I was a child. I wanted to tell stories and shape the world like my parents did. They were amused and told me to experience the world first. I needed to understand people better before I could write stories about them. So I started wandering. I found you and watched you perform. You were the first person I really studied. The insight you gave me that day was invaluable. I set out to become as familiar with the world and the people in it as you were familiar with your ship."

"When the second world ended, I went to the third. A friend showed me how to take your gift with me. After the third world, I was allowed to work on this world. I'm quite sure when I got the idea of creating a family of Franklins, but originally I wanted to found a pirate empire. Then came word about the Empire and the plans for this part of the world. We needed families with long and colorful histories that would last through the centuries. So, I took to the sea, became a pirate queen, and backed the first Emperor in his bid for power. I demanded founding a great house as my fee and started working on my new family. The project grew and grew over time."

Ben thought back to things Rolly had told him. "That took centuries. You did it in small pieces, I take it, and utilized time compression?"

"You know about that?"

"Yes, a friend of mine was a test subject in the early experiments that used it. It's an obvious guess. If the world is thousands of years old and Wally built it in a year or two, there had to be some tricks involved."

She stirred her tea and then looked at him. "How much do you know about this world, Benjamin? How it was made, and by who? I am constrained in how much I can tell you."

"I know what I've been told, that the A.I. named Wally created the game world and worked with a staff of humans who work as administrators.

She nodded. "Essentially correct. But the world wasn't created at once or even in seven days. Using an A.I. with unlimited resources, the world evolved, and independent creatures were created. It's not fair to think of them as some part of the larger A.I.; they are independent units with the computational power equivalent to a human being. Artificial people in a vast artificial world. Keep that in mind. Everyone here in this world has a mind equal to any player. The difference is, you can go back to your other world when you choose."

She noticed him tense up, and he started to reply, then looked away. Finally, he said, "Well, in a few years. I have a long contract with the ACME corporation, so I'll be in the game constantly until that's up, maybe even longer. I like it here."

She drummed her fingers on the table, thinking and becoming annoyed. "Yes, that dratted contract. Harmony told me about your limitations. Such a curse! I thought at the time it was just bullshit from Damien. It's a shame; if you weren't under contract, I'd get you into the Academy and have you train with some of the masters there. A whip is no substitute for a good sword."

Ben spread his hands. "I agree; find me a weapon that isn't on the corporations' list, and I'll gladly pick up a blade again. Until then, I'm limited to an adze, whip, and caber."

Harmonia stood. "So silly and totally unacceptable. Follow me. We are going to the salon at the academy. They have a collection of blades there. You're part of the family now. In some ways, the head of the family. Normally, anyone given the name of Benjamin eventually takes over from me. We need to get you trained properly. Let's see what we can find in the salon." Ben followed her out of Franklin house and into the side streets of the capital. The stone-paved street was wide enough for three wagons to move along it. Carriages and delivery carts were everywhere. Next to Franklin house was a small park behind a wrought iron fence, and beyond that, the large building that housed part of the Royal Academy where Couriers and Paladins trained for service to the Empire.

Harmonia passed by the main entrance and went to a side door. Ben followed down a hall to a room on the first level. It was the size of a gymnasium, and with its wooden floors, it resembled one. Racks of weapons covered the walls, along with practice armor and safety gear. Several young men and women were taking lessons or observing. Harmonia led him to a rack of dozens of different types of swords. Harmonia took a broadsword and shield to work with. "Pick one, and let's see if you can use it. We'll move on to the next if you get the message for using a default weapon."

Over the next four hours, Ben tried blade after blade. ACME and the other Corporations had worked hard on that list of weapons not usable by contract workers, adding weapons normally used in EOQ3. As usual, Ben couldn't use any of the swords. He sucked with a saber and was bad with a broadsword. A great sword felt like a log in his hands. He could barely hold the weapons and could only manage clumsy swings. When he hit Harmonia's shield, he was told that the weapon wasn't usable by him and only gave him a 1% base chance to hit.

They fell into a pattern where Ben would choose a weapon, swing at Harmonia twice, stop, and choose something else. Katana, epee, rapier, odachi, Tachi, longsword, broadsword, claymore, hand-and-a-half, bastard, gladius, tanto, falchion, zwiehander, flamberge, cutlass, shamshir, xiphos, scimitar, tulwar, kodachi, khopesh, nijato, spatha, Carolingian...on and on they went, working through a hundred different types of blades.

One of the instructors, curious, came over and started to help, and finally, the rest of the students joined in. It became a game with people tossing him weapons as fast as he could test them and find he lacked the skill to use them. Ben's arms burned when someone handed him a strange sword with no edge. Instead of a blade with two edges, it was diamond-shaped, making it much heavier and stiffer. It was blunted but came to a wicked point at the end of its four-and-a-half foot length. He took it in both hands, executed a figure eight, and lunged at Harmonia. She dodged the blow barely and advanced on Ben, who evaded three of her strikes, backing away and controlling the fight. They paused for a moment after that.

Ben stared at the blade. He'd used an Estoc only once before, during a battle. It was a heavy sword used to pierce a knight's armor. There was no edge to slash with. It was considered a specialist weapon unsuited for fencing or normal fighting. Its one advantage was piecing heavy armor and leaving a bleeding wound. But it was a sword and one he could actually use. "I think I can use this type of sword properly."

The instructor assisting them was enthusiastic; it had been a long afternoon finding a blade that Ben was allowed to use. "Let's put you to the test, then, if Dame Harmonia doesn't mind?" Harmonia nodded. "By all means. Charles Leguaan, this Benjamin the 7th, gracing us with his presence here in the capital after an exciting upbringing in the far north. Charles is 5th cousin to you, Benjamin. Charles? Ben could use your assistance. He suffers from a unique curse, and we are working to find a weapon he can use."

Charles raised an eyebrow. "I'll want the story someday, cousin. But for now, let's pair you against Barry. He would be your 4th cousin, Bartholomew Franklin. Barry? Go slow, please; he's learning."

Ben was working through forms normally used with a claymore. The length and weight were the same, but he would have to learn to kill with the point, not the slash. "If you don't mind, I'd like to go faster. This is coming back to me, and I can heal any small cuts we give to each other." He gestured, and the radiance of a healing spell lit up his hand.

Barry bowed. "And I am fine with that. I will try not to injure you grievously but will push you. Feel free to throw whatever blows you wish at me. I'm sure I can take it."

The two young Franklins began to duel, Ben slowly finding a style he liked and mostly blocking Barry's blows. He lunged four times, but the other man blocked or moved aside each time, and Ben took small cuts from his return blows. When he immediately healed each cut, several people laughed and nodded. It wasn't unheard of for a family member to inherit a few paladin blessings. Finally, Charles called a pause. "I think that weapon will skewer someone in heavy armor, but against an agile opponent, it has problems. Barry knows he can ignore a slash and only get a bruise. That leaves you wide open to his counter-blow."

Harmonia called from the sidelines. "Then I suggest Benjamin quit holding back and use everything he can bring to the fight."

Ben saluted her. "Again then, if Barry doesn't mind. This may hurt, though." Barry laughed. "Give it your best then; I'm curious."

They approached each other, and on this encounter, Ben made a small slash to Barry's leg. Barry accepted the blow and stepped forward to thrust at Ben. Before he could, his leg burst into flame. He dropped his leg and rolled to the ground as Harmonia summoned mists to extinguish the blaze. Ben cast a healing spell to fix the damage. Barry looked at him warily. "That wasn't normal fire."

Ben gave him a hand up. "Phoenix Fire, it burns hot. I can add it to any blow I give with a melee weapon. Barry rubbed his leg. "That was a hard blow as well. It might be a blunt weapon, but you put some strength behind it. How strong are you?"

Ben sighed a bit. "Not as strong as I should be. I neglected it in the first Tier, but I've raised it to 13 in Tier 2."

Charles whistled. "13 points in just the second tier? That explains how you can whip around that heavy weapon with one hand and will make your thrusts do considerable damage. What is it that you need so much strength for? Are you training to be a Paladin?"

With an embarrassed look, Ben admitted. "No, but I lost to a barmaid in arm wrestling. I focused on dexterity and agility and was the weakest of my adventuring group. That trouncing encouraged me to participate in the Baron's special training."

"Well worth the effort. You've given me a few bruises and a healthy respect for your fire magic."

Harmonia laughed. "You aren't the first to feel the sting of his spells today, Barry. Benjamin has a unique fighting style. He used that brawn to throw a table at me and beat me with a heavy book. Fencing lessons are a way for me to get my revenge. Thank you all for the help. I think that weapon will work for him after a few hundred hours of practice in the basic forms. We'll take a break, and then you can see what you can do against me."

You have gained the weapon skill: Estoc.

This heavy sword is used for piercing the heavy armor of knights and dragons. It takes both a high STR and DEX to wield it properly, knowing when to lunge with one hand like a rapier or with two hands like a spear. The heavy blade may be swung for inferior damage for those who prefer to club an opponent to death.

Thrusting Damage: 200 + 5 additional points for each point of DEX or STR over 10. This weapon negates 100 points of mitigation when thrusting.

Blunt Damage: 50 points plus 5xSTR

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