TANAKA
He was pissed. Totally pissed. Fuji might be his half-brother, but hogging all the combat was really, really... petty. OK, so Fuji was a beserker, big ghod damn deal. There wasn't much honor in keeping everyone else from the fun just because you let your balls rule your head.
He blinked again, still seeing stars. The spellcaster had used a woman's spell to escape combat. But that's what these Kethemers were, women dressed as men, no concept of individual duty, no concept of the worth of a man. If they did, they would die fighting, not run like cowards.
The crash of a door caused him to turn with glee. His turn, thank the ghods! He looked for the new target. A large, portly man had entered from the north wall, holding a small hammer, dressed in an apron. What the hell was this?
The man released a womanly shriek. "No! Damn it, no! My ghod damn insurance is going to go through the roof again!" With these odd words, the man began to concentrate. A spell caster! Tanaka moved in again... then paused again. The man was concentrating too hard, totally ignoring any possibility of attack; this was no battlemagic. There was a sudden hissing sound, and the fires that had been licking the ceiling across the room from him suddenly went out.
Tanaka looked around a bit more. The large halforc had three people around him, the handsome one who had rattled off a remarkable number of firebeams and walked directly into crossbow fire... now, there was a Kethemer that could almost be considered a man.... and two of the other humans that had been sitting at a table near by. They were administering first aid. It looked like it was desperately needed.
He could see through the door that lead to the corridor. The clumsy one was shaking his head sadly over what was obviously a corpse.
Disgusted, he turned back to his table, sat down with a thud, and grabbed his tankard. It didn't look good for any further combat opportunities. Man, it just pissed him off.
GLORM
He dragged himself back into the common room, feeling the bite where he had been scored with weapons. His attempt to catch the other man he had run into in the hallway had failed. He had been too slowed by his injuries. The man had jumped from a second story window and run away down a back alley. His fast check of the other one, the one that had gone down with a single blow of his hammer, revealed the man to be dead. Glorm had checked the body, but found only a few coins, maybe a couple of gold worth of silver at best. Not that he was proud; he had tucked the money away in his purse. He wandered over to one of the undamaged tables and collapsed into a chair. He took the box he had picked up in the hallway and dropped it on the table nonchalantly, pulled his favorite dragon pipe from his coat pocket, and lit up.
Across the room, the innkeeper, a large portly man, was yelling and screaming at a couple of Bradford Hold wardens, brandishing a small hammer. Morgan was looking innocent. Glorm wanted to find out from the man what he had learned about the apparent cause of the evening's fiasco, the dead human in fine clothing.
Glorm ignored that for a while, turned to the box. He had quickly stuffed the clothing that had fallen out back into the box, feeling more than seeing something else there. Now he looked more carefully.
The box had been sealed with a wax seal. Glorm didn't have too examine it long before he recognized the same symbol that had been on the cloak of the dead man, a dragon and sword rising from the sea. He tuned in the innkeeper's high pitched, almost hysterical voice for a moment as the man babbled to the two wardens.
"Like I said, a important visitor from Great Holder Montor... who was he here to see? What, I should harass my customers about their business? I have no idea..."
A seal of a great hold, then. He still did not have a very good grasp of the odd social conventions of the humans, but he knew a great hold meant power. He opened the box. The soiled clothing was as he remembered it, splattered with dark brown blotches. He looked more carefully, saw a jagged rend that could only have been made by a weapon, and suddenly realized that it was dried blood he was looking at. From the man he had killed? But it had been so marked when it first fell out of the box, and his blow had crushed the man's skull, not a bleeding type of wound.
He dug further and hit something hard. A dagger. And next to the dagger, a small box and a small tube of parchment, a rolled scroll. He opened the small box and found a ring on a heavy metal chain, a silver ring with a small, stylized drawing of a man on a dark, running horse. Glorm looked up in surprise. He had just seen that symbol on the cloaks of the two wardens arguing with the innkeeper. It was the symbol of Bradford hold.
Glorm discretely placed it in his pouch and picked up the scroll. The writing was oddly shimmery. Not the nice, clean mark of a pen, but the hazy, difficult to keep in focus impressions left by magic. Glorm saw that haze begin to dissipate, felt it suddenly pulling into focus, and quickly turned his eyes away and rolled the scroll back into it's original shape. Not too sensible to kick off a spell here, after all.
Glorm grimaced, sat back, and blew square smoke rings toward the ceiling. The box contained nothing that made sense. Why would such items cause the battle he had witnessed this evening?
Just then the door opened, and the man in black armor that had jumped through a window near the end of the battle wandered back in, quickly focusing on and walking over to his equally black clad friend. The one that had just arrived was looking extremely pleased with himself. Glorm noticed the sheen of fresh blood on an exposed part of the man's sword and shivered slightly.
-------------------------- BREAK FOR PERSONAL NOTES
Personal note to Aleath: Your Dmag detects magic on the box seal and the scroll.