Flashback II. Surcease of Sorrow

[Konrad Venger]

13th Day of Fall, 501AV || The Wolf's Den

Continued from here

The junkie's world was a small one. Narrow. Focused as Syna through a looking glass, hot enough to burn... until it found its goal, and then that all fell apart like a golem with the djed turned off. His life had become that endless, iron-rimmed repetition: a day or a night on the streets, scraping together gold and silver from the blood and fear of others, all to be handed over to eager hands so he could obliterate himself in that cramped, filthy backroom.

The air was always heavy, there. With smoke. With coughing. Snores. Sometimes even tears from some of the little cots. Even opening his eyes was enough to make them water, and he'd see the room through a film of dried tears across his orbs.

Red lights. Colored lanterns. Everything just shades of red, from the lamps to the walls to the wooden frames of the beds. There were a dozen of them, if he counted correctly... or fifty. Fucking Warp would do that. Lovely Warp. Yes. That was what it was. Because if it wasn't, why would he keep doing this to himself?

The disembodied thought fizzled around until it settled into his limbs and he groped for the pipe next to his bed. There was one for all of them, of course. Customer service at it's finest for a smoking hall.

Hall... ain't a hall... just a hovel...

The junkie blinked at the candle burning steadily next to the cheap clay pipe and willed his fingers to move... gods, couldn't they move any faster... after an age and a day they found the pile of dried herbs and mound of powder-

Fuck. Fuck. Shit...

Not a pile anymore. Barely even scrapings. But it could have been a mountain or a speck, he would have crammed it into the pipe anyway, mashing and sprinkling the mushroom Funkus with the powdered Warp until it was a messy mush of pure ether, waiting for the flames. He packed the bowl and angled the pipe so it would catch the flame... waited for the telltale flare as the drugs caught and then-

He breathed until his lungs filled and burned and forced the smoke to stay there through clenched teeth and closed lips. Sizzling gas soaked through the veins and flesh of his insides and coursed their way into his brain. Warp took a while to take full effect, but the Funkus would keep his mind busy until then.

That's why he was there. Had been there. Would stay there. Because the things he saw there were better than anything out there. The junkie laid back his head on the threadbare pillow that felt like a goose-stuffed luxury under his fuzzy skull, closing his eyes, waiting for the show...

figures shouting and growling in the shack arguing about food about money about how she wouldn't fuck or he wasn't interested he was so much smaller then and just watching stroking his toy with its button eyes and wishing he was older and bigger and stronger so he could make them money then they wouldn't have to fight and

all it took was a thought a tick and it was different older newer all and none and he was in the streets chasing someone no being chased so much bigger than him and there were naught but corpses shuffling through the cobbles unwilling and unable to help him and furious hands snatched him and dragged him back

a cackling corpse in a sewer snakes curling out of him and biting his face bleeding out like his very blood from a ragged hole in his chest and laughing laughing laughing at him even as he died and the snakes kept him alive mocking him as he stood with a knife in his hand no was his hand and he was metal and screaming for him to just fucking die but

a forest a woods and skeletons for trees and someone cackling at him that he could never catch no matter how hard he ran except when he did and he was smoke gas mist and on the horizon and he ran until his legs rotted and his lungs burst and filled with blood but couldn't stop would never stop until he was dead but then he was falling apart even as he reached out and the tattooed man was laughing at him

he was a storm in the storm watching it and being it and seeing it and he was howling in the middle as countless limbs clawed at him and he cursed them in all the foulness he could summon but they wouldn't stop until he was ravaged and bleeding and he curled into a ball and wanted to go home wanted the noise to stop but it rose and rose and

"Hey... Hey... Hey, wake up!"

The storm grew a hand and his body returned to him with extreme reluctance. It took a long chime of blurry, muddled blinking before the junkie was aware of a wizened face glaring at him from the other end of an arm. His hand went for a blade and didn't even get around it before another, larger, younger paw stopped him.

The Akalak, of course. Even taller than him and violent, garish purple against his tired eyes, warning him with his sneer that any further attempts would be rewarded with broken bones, not just a firm grip.

"You leave now!" The woman said, shaking him and pointing to the metal door at the end of the narrow room. "You have no gold, you have no stuff! So you go, and we use bed. Go, go, now, now!"

The junkie clutched his head with his free hands as the broken Common became fluent... whatever, instead. Benshira, maybe? Vantha? Myrian? Fuck, he didn't know or care, it was sodding annoying... and completely right. He'd smoked up the last of his purchase that day (or was it the night before?) and that meant his time obliterating his mind in that stiff bed was over. He wriggled and jerked like his limbs weren't working right, trying to stagger but falling instead.

The Akalak heaved him up with a snarl, pushing him back against the cot and looking him up and down.

"Dun' look like much now, do ya?"

Konrad sneered with the glassy, empty face of a junkie and his chuckle was like a dry wind across sand.

"When have I fuckin' ever, brother-fucker?"

[Konrad Venger]

Money. No matter how much he snorted or smoked or swallowed, no matter how he tried every fresh day to obliterate his senses, he always needed more money. It seemed more and more that even food and drink were but afterthoughts to the narcotics he bought. Just fuel for a fire gone from raging to ebbing, glimmering weakly under the bloat of his addiction.

However flowery one might make it, the answer was always the same: Konrad staggering out into the darkness, or the shadows of the day, and seeking men who would pay for death, or perhaps men who no-one would miss.

"Akalak... toof! ... cunt..."

A bloody tooth skittered across the cobbles. Wisdom. Fitting. How wise was a man who picked a fight with a seven-foot slab of muscle, while out of his mind on Warp?

Figures skittered by him in the waning light of day, adroitly avoiding the slumped vagrant squatting in a puddle. The doorway to the smoking rooms was a ways down the alley; the Akalak didn't dump him right on the step, of course. He didn't need some big bruised lump spitting teeth and getting in the way of clients.

Konrad let the water soak his breeches until he wouldn't have noticed if he'd pissed himself. Until he couldn't feel his legs and the absence of the Warp made him acutely aware of his numbness, his face a sweaty mass, the twitches and tremors of his limbs as his body started to whine for his dose. All these things and the chuckling in his skull, the snickering in his soul, that same face from days before that he took from the world and gained no satisfaction.

"Shut up... SHUT UP!"

The mother gripped her child closer and hurried on past the screaming relic. Shouting at nothing. Growling and hissing at the cobbles and the walls. Howling at daemons. Konrad heard those eager feet tapping away and didn't even have the strength to lunge. All the energy in his body seemed dedicated to cramping his stomach and squeezing his head from the inside.

Need more. More. Gotta find it.

So off he went, through the warren of alleys and side-streets and close, packed tenement blocks with their looming height. The evening hour did not effect street traffic. A barrage of pedestrians assailed him, and he felt every one. So he kept his head low and shouldered his way through them, through shit and running rain water until he found the forum that led to the Blood Pits... and heard the chorus of commerce.

"Wrap! Buzz! Rez! Tapers and Temper and Winger!"

"Best inna' city, right 'ere, take yuz t'Syna and back an' bring Cheva wiv'ya!"

"Four? Five? 'ere y'go, mate, and there's an extra! Buy five doses and get a sixth free, that's the deal of the day, friends!"

The blood never stopped flowing in the pits; Konrad often thought that was the true reason for the name. Legend had it that there was a constant stream of the stuff oozing through the drains and into the bay; on feast days, it was a river, so much it changed the color of the drinking water, if only slightly. But that day it wasn't a cup of grog and a risky bet he was after.

A score of dealers harangued and haggled and howled on the walls leading to the Pits, an ever-flowing crowd of punters their target. Konrad stayed to the shadows and kept a close eye, shaking and trembling under his ragged duster, watching and waiting for...

... there.

He saw the hand-to-hand, a thing repeated a thousand times a day on the streets of Sunberth. A half-naked laborer broke the flow to approach a hawker, handing over a handful of coin and placing his order-

-and before the words had even been spoken, another youth stepped behind the hawker, taking the proffered coin and pausing just long enough to hear the order repeated. Some sober side of Konrad thought that a nice touch: once from the punter, again from the hawker, makes sure the brat won't forget it before-

-running off through the crowd and round the corner, with Konrad lurching into stiff-legged movement a tick later. He knew that he might lose the little sod, too, and would have to find a nice dark hovel to wait in until he came around again. Wouldn't be the first time. The runners were young and quick for a reason: the dealers knew they could be followed, and needed rabbits to outrun the dogs.

Konrad still pressed his pursuit. He lumbered through the alleys and smacked into the walls as he rounded them, and... gods, this boy wasn't too quick, actually. He was barely running, just jogging, and the chill in the air would have suggested he not do so.

Something was wrong. Something felt off. The old Konrad, the one he'd left behind in the sewer, would have known. Sensed in that feral way all survivors do. Backed off, picked another mark, anything but keep stumbling after the kid when he knew something was wrong.

But he needed the money. His body was screaming for what it could purchase, and all he heard was more-more-more screamed inside his skull, blotting out colors and senses and common sense, for that matter. Any eel of concern was blown away by joy when he saw the kid knock on a door... which opened quickly... and hold up a hand with three thin fingers raised.

The order. That's the place.

Konrad abandoned anything resembling stealth. With the kid still in the doorway he strolled over, some semblance of his old strength and wolfish gait creeping back into his steps. But he was without his kopis now. Pawned. His kukri went the same way. Only his dagger. The one all this had started with. That was still tucked into his boot.

He paused and pulled it clear. It always felt comfortable there. Reassuring, and he would need that in a few ticks. Still the kid did not turn, but glanced his-

Something is wrong! What is wrong with you?!

Konrad's addled body kept moving even as his mind screamed. Fuck his mind. He'd kick the kid out the way, butcher whoever it was behind the door, take the gold, the dope, the herd, the powders, whatever, and be gone. Then his mind could shut the fuck up and leave him be for a few more days.

A fine plan. Simple and direct. All predicated on them having no idea he was coming.

Then the kid laughed and jumped away from the door, sticking up two fingers at Konrad in crass insult. A moment later, as Konrad was still pausing for that fatal half-tick, a thick wooden bat came hurtling out from the doorway and spread his nose across his face.

Scratch that plan.

[Konrad Venger]

"What a fuckin' loser."

Makki barked out his laugh like a dog when he saw that big ugly cunt in the hat go arse over tit from a bat around the bonce. Gods, the wanker was about as subtle and shadowy as a goose in a bathtub. Tripping over trash, stomping around corners, bumping into walls... Maki knew he was being followed within a handful of ticks, and he knew what to do when that happened.

"Take 'em to the place next door to the stash," Skinny Harlie had told him, told all the little runners working their patch. "Then when they open up, hold up three fingers. That tells 'em trouble's coming. Then get the bloody hells clear and let the lads take care of the cunt."

Suffice to say, The Lads were doing just that.

"Fuck me, that was easy enough."

The words floated into Konrad's head like smoke through a hurricane: with great difficulty. They echoed and hammered worse than his head when he crashed back into the mud. His face was... beyond hurting. The pain was a constant howl in ears he didn't even have. He fought against the black around his eyes, barely holding onto a wall with one hand-

-until a boot lashed out and nearly crushed it and he cried out-

"Shaddap!"

The boot came at him like a wrecking ball. He was actually glad he didn't see it coming. His head snapped back and for a moment he was sure he was airborne. He couldn't feel the slimy mud or the wet ground or the trash or anything else that mattered. All there was in his world was a mass of white, bright pain, spreading out from the ruins of his face.

"Gods above... ugly fuck, inee?"

"Fuck, you mean he looked like that before? I thought the bat did that!"

Konrad heard it all without having the ears to do so. He barely had the strength to keep breathing. He listened to one man chide the other for his dull wits, then send that little fucking kid skipping along on his way. No, it didn't matter how much he wanted to watch: Harlie didn't pay him to stand around watching junkies get the fuck beaten out of them.

Junkie. That's all you are now. A vagrant. A derelict. A fucking abomination.

"S'got a nice dagger, 'ere. Think I'll keep it."

"Hey... I fink he's... laughing..."

Both men stared down at the thing on the floor, mouth filling with blood and rain water as he wheezed up at them. His fingers twitched, groping for a knife that was long gone. He couldn't even see, eyes wide but unseeing, not in that world or that place but far away and finally, finally it seemed Konrad had just left it all behind.

"Bloody bampot. Lets gedim somewhere quiet and do 'im."

"Fuck it, leave 'im there. Dinner'll get cold."

"C'mon, you know he'll slink off-"

"Yeah, an' he won't be trying this silly shit again, will he? Look at him."

Konrad lay there. In his rags. In his blood. His piss. With teeth clogging his throat and his eyes still useless, even with rain pattering into them. He could feel the weight of their stare on him, and the laughter stopped.

Without eyes and only a fraction of his ears, he could feel their scorn. As if all his years had changed not a thing.

"He's nothin'."

Konrad coughed and choked and tried to vomit the words back at them. He tried to stand but managed a sort of pathetic half-roll instead, blood that was drowning him now drooling from his lips and out his nose like a broken pipe. Laughter rang in his ears and he waited for the hate he'd brewed and bottled for a lifetime to seize his limbs and drive hum upward and squash those insects.

There was no miracle. A season of Warp and Temper and Rez is no mean thing for the body to endure. He managed to get one hand flat on the ground and push up weakly, a gurgling curse bubbling from his lips.

"Basserds... fuhggin bassurds..."

Something entered him. Low, in his back, a piercing, shrieking pain that set him on fire from arse to neck and drove him back down into the mud. The words came closer to him now, as he lay there panting into the mud.

"There. Problem solved. Mouthy cunt gets finished off, we finish our dinner, then we dump him after."

"Gonna leave yer new blade?"

"Fuck it, I'm better off. No clue what it might have on it, ridin' around with a junkie..."

Every breath tore a chunk of his will away and shredded it. His body took less. They came out in sucking, shallow pants and every attempt to rise, move his hands, move his head... no... it was too much. It was too much and what did it matter anyway?

None of it does. None of it did. None of it ever will.

Beef stew. They were having beef stew. The last words they spoke, short of a gale of laughter, before the blackness finally closed Konrad's eyes and he lay still and filthy in the mud, with his own dagger in his back.

[Konrad Venger]

Bessy had found there was always money to be made at the Blood Pits. A woman with a steady hand, strong stomach and decent knowledge of a man's insides (as decent as a Sunberth "education" could provide, that is) was always in demand in the aftermath of the brutal brawls that were always played out there.

"C'mon, Hansel, stop yer dawdling..."

Of course, since it was quite a walk from her house, she had to take along her extra set of muscles. Which was a good way of describing Hansel, since muscle was pretty much his saving grace. A few inches shy of seven feet tall, three feet wide, a fat-looking blob from a distance but when you had a closer look, you realized that said flab was more of a layer. Under it was sheer muscle.

Bessy had to coax him away from the docks like an oxen from their yoke, so much extra were the foremen willing to pay the young man. Hundredweight of flour under each arm for eight bells a day? Sure, just point him towards the ship.

But those men who spoke nicely to him and gave him shiny coins weren't family. His Aunt Bessy was.

"Aunt Bess, this man said I need-"

"You don't let men like that tell you what you need, Hansel" Bessy said with her customary bustle, fixing her strongest, most testicle-withering glare onto the powder-pusher like the ill-intent of the gods. "Come along and take yer Auntie's hand, my knees are feelin' poorly."

"Yes, Auntie Bess."

A sweet boy, but so easily led... and yes, Bessy did realize that she was "leading" him in her own way, but not in an direction that led to drugs or loose women or violence. She'd lost enough men and boys in her family to the gangs and their pointless feuding, profitable though it had been for her in the past. But now, in the Winter years of her life, she simply wanted to watch them grow, not endlessly dew them up every night.

The old lady sighed under her whale-skin umbrella and continued her bustle through the crowd, clinging onto Hansel's barrel-thick arm and letting his sheer presence carve the way through it.

"Would it be so bad not to hack each other up just fer a day?"

"Wozzat, Auntie Bess?"

"Nothing, Hansel. Quick, take that way back, there's less people."

Hansel shifted direction with all the speed a man his size was capable of; it was like watching a man-o-war shift course. But, as usual, Auntie Bess was right. There was far less people he had to avoid. Auntie Bess was often right about things. When she said what was wrong with a man on the slabs and bunks in the Pits, and Hansel had to hold them down or move them around, she usually found she was right.

Not always, but Auntie Bess was not a god. As far as he knew.

"Hansel, mind your-"

CRUNCH

"Urgh..."

That did not sound healthy, and Hansel was not too surprised that it was a man he'd stepped on. Oh. Darn. That was silly of him. Hansel had to be careful where he stepped, Auntie Bess always said so. Sometimes he just missed people. But this was a little different, he thought. After all, the man was slathered in mud, covered in the stuff, and wearing all black! How was he supposed to see him? All that and this was a very strange place to go for a nap.

Then he saw the dagger sticking out of the man, and Hansel got the sneaking suspicion he hadn't been napping.

"Gods, he's not dead."

"That's good, right?"

"Leggo of me arm, Hansel."

"Sorry, Auntie Bess."

Bessy was a lifelong Sunberth lass. She'd sewed men up in choking snow, driving rain, biting cold and heat so harsh her tools slid out of her hands from the sweat. The rain was fierce that night but it didn't stop her from getting on her knees and running her callused hands over the frighteningly still form of the man.

He's not dead. Still breathing. Gods... damn dagger must have just missed his lung.

"Hansel, open my bag."

"Auntie Bess, it's all wet and-"

"Hansel?!"

"Yes, Auntie Bess..."

"Good lad. And hold the brolly over us."

Hansel did as he was told and without complaint. Auntie Bess told him once that he was blessed with a brain that "didn't make a fuss of things", and told him that was good. It meant he could hold an umbrella over two people with rain pouring over him and not question it. Looking at the blood and the insides of folks was harder, but Hansel got used to that, like Auntie Bess said he would.

She was usually right, when it came to such things.

"Hmm... right, then. Hansel, some gauze, now!"

When the dagger came out, there was the fountain she knew there would be. Most times it was smarter to leave the damn thing where it was until you got the patient onto a table, but they didn't have that option that night. So Bessy prepped got the gauze in hand, then grabbed the dagger by the handle and pulled-

-dropping it immediately and jamming a wad of gauze into the gaping slice instead. They bled white to red in ticks, but she expected that. She grabbed another one, Hansel's hands moving slow but purposeful, and the fourth handful... yes... it had stopped.

"Hansel? Get the man up and slap your hand over the gauze. I need you to keep pressure on it, hmm?"

"What's 'pressure'?"

"It's when you press down ha-um, well, a little firmly. Not too hard. Remember, you don't know your-"

"Own strength, yes, Auntie Bess."

"Good lad. Ready?"

"Aye."

Hansel reached down and slid one ham-sized hands under the man's stomach, bracing his legs and arms so he could pick him up like a kitten. Hansel was hardly a thinking man, but he knew all the ways to lift things. Once the man was over his shoulder he could shift one hand to slap across his back where that nasty cut was, keep the gauze in place, oh, and the blood.

That was the plan, anyway. Until he got halfway up and Auntie Bess saw the man's face and gasped.

That was strange. Auntie Bess had seen lots of horrible things. She wouldn't talk to him about many of them. She said a sweet lad like him didn't need all the nastiness men could do to each other rattling around in his skull. But she didn't make those sounds, because she'd seen them all.

"Venger...?"

"What's a 'Venger', Auntie Bess?"

"He's... I..."

Grime and blood and broken bones could not hide the visage of Konrad Venger; couldn't hide her own handiwork, wrought by the same lined and thin hands that caressed it it now. This was the third time the man had crossed her past.

The first, when he was a boy. Staggering through her door with barely ten Summers to his memory, clutching his ruined face so that the skin would not fall off. Another child destroyed by a drunken father; another soul doomed to repeat the same violent mistakes.

The second, when he'd crashed through it years later, pierced and impaled, abandoned by his fellows and jabbering about the gold he had for her. She was strong enough back then to drag him somewhere fitting for her treatment, and had not treated him like the victim he'd clearly been when he was a child. He'd become a killer, that much she knew. A breaker and frightener, an ender and a reaver. Just another ganger in a city that devoured and was being devoured by them.

Three times. Down an alley I'd never usually take. The gods must...

"Of all the souls, it had to be his?"

It was a cruel joke, she was certain. A vicious jape from the gods themselves, that thrice she might enable a man who was capable of little more than ending lives to keep doing so. Iyt was cruel. It was unjust. It was a crime against all those yet unmet by Konrad, who would die at his hand.

Hansel heard a tinkling behind her. Auntie Bess was touching her necklace.

It could be no-one but me.

"Nothing. Walk smartly, lad. No dawdling and keep that hand firm, mark me!"

"Yes, Auntie Bess."

Auntie Bess was quiet on the way home. Hansel thought she was upset, but whenever he glanced over his shoulder, she was staring hard ahead, like a captain at the very prow of her ship. So Hansel kept tromping ahead, limp hands of Konrad flapping behind him like he was a deer he'd just shot and was bringing home for a skinning.

"Auntie Bess?"

"Yes, Hansel?"

"Did you bring his hat?"

"Yes, Hansel."

"Oh. Good."

Continued here

[Aladari Coolwater]

Name:Konrad Venger

XP Award:

• Observation + 2
• Running + 1
• Larceny + 1

Lore:

• Funkus: Fast-acting Relief
• Warp Makes the Mind Fuzzy
• Never Enough Money
• Signs of Withdrawl: Twitching
• Satisfying an Addiction
• Location: Sunberth Bloodpits

Penalties/Rewards :

Konrad will have not only a large and raised scar on his back, but he will experience symptoms of infection for the next few weeks because of the mud in the wound. That will include burning around the wound, swelling, puss, and it may rip open or develop gangrene if it is not treated properly. It will take a skilled healer to minimize the time spent in recovery.

Konrad will also experience withdrawls of diminishing strength for 30 days, or until he gets his next dose.

Comments :

If you're going to be using Auntie Bess any more than you already have, especially since she had such a large impact on Konrad, you likely need to file for an NPC at the Help Desk or ask Anark if you can add her to the city.

I would have liked to give you more skill points, but this was largely Konrad's thoughts instead of actions, and what he did wasn't very in-depth. I tried to give lores in their place. It was hard to tell with your lore layout what lores you did and didn't have, so I gave you the bloodpits location anyway. I'd recommend cleaning that up sometime in the future.

Don't forget to edit your request to reflect its graded status. If you have any questions or feel I forgot something, please contact either me or Anarkhos.