Last time on Chosen of the Dungeon Master, the undead servants of the void reenacted the three stooges and then Ratcatcher was sent to go find Wren alone.
So time to switch to Wren! I just realized last chapter was our first not to have any deaths. Aw. Wren, I’m counting on you to keep the body count up.
He stood on an open road in the middle of a pleasant and sunny day. Behind him, the road stretched up and over a low hill, and beyond it into the distance. Ahead of him, he could see a distant haze where Nexus should be, and the blue ribbon of a river scrolled in and out of view. Trees dotted the landscape in a most picturesque fashion, and the sky was a pleasant shade of blue.
Also there’s a bunch of bandits in his way.
Thing is, Nexus is a huge trading metropolis. That’s why it’s called Nexus, because it’s where everything converges. Would the roads really be empty once you’re in sight of it, even if it’s still a long way off? If nothing else there should be the less picturesque signs of other travelers, like yeddim dung. (Yeddim are to oxen as smeefs are to rabbits.)
But back to the bandits. Bandit leader’s female! Thanks, book. You didn’t have to do that, but you did, and I appreciate it.
Wren’s a bit worried, but he says they’re just regular thugs and not trained soldiers. So he starts explaining that hey, he’s just a lowly monk, he doesn’t have anything of value.
This is actually a really good point. Less the money bit and more the monk part. Immaculate monks, even mortal ones, are infamous for kung fu, and plenty of monks are Dragonblooded without any obvious sign of such. They’re just really not a good target.
But then, if you think about it, who is for them? Again, they’re blocking a road to a major trading hub. That means that extremely valuable stuff is moving through here…and extremely well trained guards with it. So you might have a single person or small group preying on individual travelers, because they can easily hide out and avoid notice, a larger group would have to be able to take on armed caravans. Unskilled bandits should be hanging out in backwaters.
Anyway, the bandit leader explains that they’re not bandits, they’re toll collectors, and Wren points out they’re not wearing the Nexus uniform.
Wren also continues to insist he has no money, but seems to be antagonizing them into attacking, when it seems he could just as easily have said he has no money so why bother with him? By all appearances he doesn’t.
Anyway, Wren successfully taunts them into joining battle! Roll initiative! Realize you’re fucked because oh shit that’s an Immaculate monk!
Wren manages to take out a half dozen simultaneously. That was probably not doable under the game system – combat between mortals is bloody and fatal, and even the best swordsman in the world goes down to a mob of ordinary soldiers. He also does this after dropping his walking stick, so he doesn’t even have a weapon. And he parries a blow barehanded and disarms the guy in the process – sure, it’s stunted, but come on, he’s a mortal.
This is our first real display of badassness, and it’s a mortal not using any charms. Book, book, book, what are you thinking?
With all of them downed, he considers killing them but decides not to, instead telling them to get themselves out of the area as soon as they’re capable of standing again. While at first this seemed merciful, on second thought it really isn’t – well, it’s unclear. Are these bully thugs who are just thieving, or murdering thugs? If it’s the former, then killing them is an overreaction and he gets no good person points for reconsidering. If it’s the latter, then they’re going to go kill people, they’re just not going to do it near Nexus, so leaving them alive and free is morally wrong.
It’s not like those are the only two options. If you don’t want to play judge jury executioner, you can try to tie them up and go find someone to report them to, although odds are they’ll get loose before anyone goes to collect them, or you can drag them along with you, or you can discuss the economic reasons they’ve been driven into banditry and see if you can help. All of those aren’t quick fixes that leave you able to just keep going after the random encounter, but that’s the point. Violence is the easy solution, not the best.
Wren reflects that bandits so close to Nexus is yet another sign that things were unraveling all over. But they’re not, really. The Realm is gearing up for civil war, yes, the tributaries are being bled dry to pay for it, true, but places like Nexus and the other free cities are profiting from it. They should be expanding their influence now that the Realm can’t do anything about it.
Which isn’t to say there can’t be an increase in banditry. Just that the focus here is wrong. There shouldn’t be a general increase in lawlessness and people taking advantage of societal weakness. Rather, if there’s an increase in bandits, it’s because people on the lower end are getting desperate. They, not city-corp Nexus, are the ones who’ll be hurt by change.
So if you want to show a breakdown of order, what he should be seeing are the dead bodies of bandits strung up as a warning to others.
But of course the scene is so we know he’s badass. In that case, it’d make more sense to have him attacked by a group that isn’t a fan of the Order. That could also better develop the business with the god earlier, since all we know right now is something about his bargain was against the Order’s rules. The fact the Immaculate Philosophy is based around stamping out direct worship of gods hasn’t been mentioned at all yet.
Wren explains that he’s avoided people and sent a message along to the Palace Sublime using another spirit, instead of finding a damn Dragonblooded. Because by god we will not be seeing humans using magic. And now he’s heading toward the end of his trip.
toward Nexus where no doubt the Most Illustrious and Illuminated Chejop Kejak had a message and a new task waiting for him.
Oh, poor book. How were you to know that dear Carjack and all other Sidereals would end up having a supernatural effect making it all but impossible for anyone to remember them?
See, Sidereals are the guys who handle fate. When they decided to box the Solars on the basis of being fucking crazy assholes who kept breaking it, they used the constellation of the mask to avoid prosecution for the whole murder business, causing it to break under the strain and rendering them all permanently “hidden” in various ways. You have to be another Sidereal or Celestial god or roll really, really well to remember them after meeting. If a Sidereal wants to interact with people “normally”, they have to construct a fake background for themselves and weave it in, or stuff a stardust bit into your mouth and burn essence to make you register as an acquaintance. And the higher essence a Sidereal gets, the stronger it gets – and here we have a mortal casually namedropping the oldest, highest-essence Sidereal in the setting.
But not knowing those little tidbits doesn’t excuse this completely. Chejop Kejak is the puppetmaster behind the puppetmaster behind the puppetmaster. He knows not to let things lead back to him. What if Wren had been interrogated? He’d have given up the name and then the Abyssal(s) would know the tomb must be something really important.
(…actually it doesn’t make sense the tomb would be something really important. Chejop was the ringleader of the Ursurpation. He’d know who was and wasn’t buried. Plus Sidereals all have access to magic google so they should be able to turn up that the place is an empty fake. Now, normally you can explain anything Sidereals do with “because fate”, but he can’t have been planning for the traps to kill Sandheart, anger the Prince of Shadows and then cause Ratcatcher to be sent to chase Wren because the Underworld is outside of fate! The loom covers Creation only. And it’s really unlikely he’d send someone there to set up traps for some long plot, because it’s on a shadowland surrounded by ghosts, so it’s going to be impossible to predict anything long term in the area, too many outside of fate factors.)
One way of looking at this is suedom. Not sure that’s the correct reading, though – I think it’s just general clumsiness and failing to understand scale. This character works for the Order, and the known characters who give commands for the Order involve Chejop, therefore this character is doing things for Chejop. It’s not meant to make Wren the super ultra special mortal who knows him, it’s that the author doesn’t realize Chejop is secret ruler of the twice-Earth’s-landmass world and a busy, busy man.
Back to the story. We learn Wren’s deliberately dragging his feet using the excuse he’s trying to be inconspicuous because he’s not looking forward to his next mission. So apparently he doesn’t realize anathema have tracking charms and his only advantage was a head start. He goes on to say that he does prefer it to copying texts, because the book thinks they’re exactly like secluded Western monks but who know kung-fu instead of priests closely tied to the community around them. The Immaculate Philosophy revolves around controlling the population and finding anathema! The texts are secondary at best and the world has printing presses! MONKS DO OTHER THINGS THAN COPY THE DAMN TEXTS!
It’s like the sum total of things this guy knows about monks is that they handled books.