Player Name: James
Character Name: Darrik Meathandler
Age: 82
Race: Dwarf
Profession: Formerly a butcher, now a city guard.
Height: 5 feet
Weight: approx 80kg/175lb
====Physical Description====
Darrik is tall for a dwarf, much like his grandfather had been - or so his mother claims. Gossip in the dwarven community has it that his ancestors had tarried with humans, and Darrik was a throwback to a half-dwarf predecessor. Although still considered young as a dwarf, Darrik's eighty-two years have left laughter lines around his green eyes. Darrik's adolescent tendency towards amateur pugilism have left the dwarf's nose an oft-broken ruin, as well as thick knotted calluses on his knuckles. A thick black beard frames a jawline hinting at a strong stubborn streak, while an ever-ready smile more than hints at mischief.
Years of a high protein diet coupled with a busy life have left Darrik a stocky and muscular barrel of a dwarf, quite capable of hefting the carcases his primary profession required. Thick arm and leg muscles have developed in his years working as a butcher for power and stability, rather than agility.
Darrik's dislike of wasting his own time manifests itself even in his walk, which is typically a determined march. He's a dwarf who cannot be without a sense of purpose. And if today's purpose is picking up a barrel of salt, then by Teodinus, it would get done properly and efficiently.
However, what the dwarf considers a waste of time or a valid purpose can shift with the change of tides, and it was such a shift that changed his habitual dress code from a butcher's leather-aproned attire to the steel trappings of a guard.
====Possessions====
==Butcher's Shop==
Darrik's apprenticeship was with a human butcher named Holsted, a dour man with no family. After his apprenticeship was concluded, Darrik stayed on with the aging Holsted for many years as a Journeyman in his trade before being able to call himself a master of his craft. In the final decade of Holsted's life, Darrik almost ran the old man's business for him. The dwarf's decades of loyalty to Holsted moved the dying man to bequeath his own shop to Darrik.
The butchery is located in the downtown district where the supply of electricity meant he could operate a viable cold room in the basement. The expense was in finding a two storey building with a basement, and associated renovation costs.
At present time, with Darrik's shift to the duties of a guard, the shop is run by his son and newly-recognised Journeyman butcher Henrik.
In addition to the shop, Darrik invested in a small barrowcart to assist in deliveries and procurement. The cost in time and bishani to maintain a pony made the dwarf decide on elbow grease in preference. Henrik, not quite as burly as his father, is making enquiries with a stables about hire arrangements in exchange for meat supply.
Floorplan:
Top floor: Office and living facilities (suitable for one person in comfort, two people cramped)
Ground floor: Shop front and equipment for secondary cuts
Basement: coldroom and equipment for primary cuts
==Residence==
Darrik currently sleeps in a room at a cheap inn within the downtown district called the Friendly Firkin. Operated by an old acquaintance from Darrik's butchering days, another dwarf named Fredrik, the dwarf guard began leasing a room there using his wage after successfully completing his guard training.
As the presence of a resident guard helps keeps things quiet at closing time it works out well for the inn operator, while for Darrik it provides a convenient location. Although Darrik still technically owns his butcher shop, and secures most of his belongings in a heavy lockbox there, the move to the Inn gives Henrik more space to grow into his profession as a butcher. And, secretly, Darrik hopes the extra space given to Henrik will increase his chances of becoming a grandfather.
==Day-to-day equipment==
Guard uniform: Darrik tends to wear the full armour, including bevor and sallet visor, when on round. Darrik feels that, after the effort they put in to make the damn stuff fit a dwarf, it was the polite thing to do. The only time he doesn't is when he has duties requiring a modicum of stealth.
Darrik's on-duty weaponry includes a warhammer instead of mace, as he finds the pick part handy at times, and a shortsword instead of the arming sword. Aside from the tools of his new profession, the dwarf also carries a sturdy butcher's knife and cleaver for close-quarter emergencies.
Additionally Darrik commissioned a reinforced steel buckler with studded shield boss to accommodate his particularly aggressive use of buckler in combat.
====Strengths====
==Member of the Marn Guard==
Although Darrik still remains a basic guardsman of the watch after five years of service, there are benefits to being part of the City Guard, beyond that of equipment and social standing. Though his race limits his promotion prospects, the dwarf has earned a reputation for diligence and attention to detail.
Darrik's sense of pride and duty in having succeeded in his dream of becoming a guard often help counterbalance the ever-underlying grief of his wife's loss. The workload helps, too.
At present time Darrik has made fourth rank as a Guardsman, and is technically speaking part of the 4th Watch. However, the dwarf frequently finds himself seconded to the Auxiliary section to work on those particularly unpleasant jobs his superiors deem perfect for the dwarf's talents
==Skilled Butcher==
Having spent decades in his first profession, Darrik is intimately familiar with the process of preparing a once-living creature into the neat consumable packages beloved by all. In addition, knowing how creatures are put together and come apart has proven useful on one or two difficult occasions when patrolling the historic district.
Being a business owner has its own perks, and Darrik is not without contacts in various trades, though a lot of folk are more guarded in their dealings since Darrik changed profession.
==Physically Robust==
What Darrik lacks in grace, physical size and elegance, he makes up for in sheer bloody-minded stamina, brawn, and cunning. His body has been strengthened from years of pushing and hauling barrows filled with carcases, of lifting the aforementioned onto hooks, of preparing primary and secondary cuts. His tendency in adolescent years, of getting into brawls, have given him the mental resilience required to take a blow while dealing one back. And Guard training, well, that wasn't a cakewalk: join the Guard, become a Man, as the saying goes. The lengthy hell the dwarf's sergeant put the dwarf through, in an attempt to scare him off, toughened Darrik for his new profession in ways no other experience could have.
==Mental Resilience==
You don't spend decades carving up carcases without developing a resistance to the horrors of death. Darrik doesn't have a squeamish bone in his body, and is often assigned to cleanup duty on the nastier cases, further hardening his mind to the horrors his role exposes him to. Darrik does not scare easily.
==Limited magical resistance: mind-affecting magics==
A couple of years ago Darrik's superiors discovered he had a handy talent he'd been unaware of his entire life. A quirk of Darrik's mixed bloodline, his dwarven heritage, his personal hatred of magic, and a slight talent for magic all mixed together to create a strong resistance to magics affecting Darrik's mind and perceptions.
It was discovered when he'd been actively hunting a successful thief who, unbeknownst to the Guard, had a knack for clouding and misdirecting the minds of their pursuers. The thief's surprise was absolute when Darrik ran him down and clonked him in the face with his buckler. It was the thief's disbelieving and head-rattled protestations of 'You can't see me, I clouded your head' which brought Darrik's talent to their attention.
To Darrik's disgust, he is now often assigned to those cases requiring co-operation between guards and battlemages, if only because the mages can't get their hooks in his head. There's no love lost or deep trust between the two departments, even today.
====Weaknesses====
==Prejudice against mutants, magic, clawed things==
Hylde's death also killed something in Darrik. He'd always been a bit liberal-minded, even with his hatred of magic. But when Hylde's body was found, in the state in which is was found, Darrik learned a deep-seated hatred of all things magic and unnatural. If it isn't a human, a dwarf, an elf, or a gnome, Darrik doesn't like it. If it has claws, can change shape, or looks downright unpleasant - Darrik hates it.
Darrik can keep a lid on it, though, doesn't let himself become a frothing lunatic. But if a case gives him an opportunity to hunt one down, the dwarf's pursuit of his prey tends to be reckless and foolishly unrelenting. Darrik already has claw and bite scars from sewer pursuits ending in-almost tragedy.
Darrik has been known to make the wrong call on a case, pursuing a non-human target when stronger evidence has pointed to a more mundane perpetrator.
==Career constrained by prejudice==
Given Darrik's own prejudice, there is a certain irony that his own career has a not-so-glass ceiling, in place not very far from where he currently stands.
Whereas humans can accept a dwarf in a tradesman's role, which has a certain insinuation of subservience to it, it is not so easy to accept one in a position of authority. Especially one in the Guard. Darrik has found his promotion prospects almost non-existent. He'll be lucky to reach Constable, let alone Sergeant. After five years of diligence and bloody hard work, Darrik has still only reached the fourth ranking of guardsman.
In addition, the 'privilege' Darrik frequently 'enjoys' of being seconded to the Auxiliary section generally involves messy cleanups and sewer jobs. A circumstance which Darrik judges is more due to his heritage than his skillset.
==Stubborn can be Stupid==
Whilst not unintelligent, Darrik's stubborn nature often kicks in at the worst times, the dwarf digging in his heels and facing down a problem head-to-head when a safer course of action would be to retreat or concede temporary defeat. Pride before the fall, as it were.
==Unfinished Business==
Beneath his almost-fanatical work ethic, Darrik is fuelled by the overwhelming desire to somehow find and punish his wife's killer.
It is something which Darrik would risk everything for. But all he has to work with are a mental image of the wounds, and a memory of the scent lingering near the corpse. Those memories are scarred into his mind, never to be forgotten.
====History====
==Childhood==
Darrik was precocious as a child, driving his parents to distraction with one obsession after the other. There would be months where he would focus diligently on some new interest, be it the Tomes of the First Settlers, or pretending to be a city guard. Being taller than his playmates even then, Darrik was frequently the butt of 'human' jokes, spurred on in part by the inevitable rumour-mongering in the dwarven community regarding the possible taint to his family's dwarven lineage.
For Darrik, though, the idea of being more than his peers instilled a certain amount of stubborn pride. Part of this pride resulted in the dwarf being one of the few children in his neighbourhood who actively enjoyed school, and learning to read and write. And largely as a response to the early years of teasing, his obsession with Marn and the notion of patriotic service, was a seed planted and left dormant for many years. He nurtured a dream that one day he'd become a guardsman, and nobody would be able to fault his loyalty and patriotism.
==Adolescence==
Darrik matured rapidly, much in the way of human children, and his precociousness evolved naturally into early rebelliousness. The young Darrik considered sleep something of a curse, as it took time away from doing things. And 'doing things' was, to Darrik, the entire point for existing. During daylight hours, the dwarf continued attending public schooling, and took perverse delight in arguing. No matter the subject matter, Darrik would find a contrary viewpoint and argue it, instigating many schoolyard brawls as a result, and earning him his first broken nose. Which was about when Darrik got serious about learning how to punch back.
Afternoons were often spent with the one uncle his family had warned him to stay away from, on account of his being a 'bad influence'. Old 'Broke-tooth Toskvig was a bouncer and brawler, and took delight in teaching the child of his 'stuffy sister' the proper way to bludgeon a man with strong dwarven fists. Apart from basic pugilism, Toskvig showed the young dwarf some of the dirty fighting techniques he'd picked up along the way.
The result was that, by the time Darrik was of an age to be hustled off as an apprentice, his long-suffering parents took the first opportunity to get their troublesome child into something resembling honest work. And thus Darrik ended up an apprentice to the butcher Holsted, a dour ox of a man who'd been through dozens of apprentices, and had a reputation as a no-nonsense master whose apprentices typically ran away or quit.
==Life as a Butcher==
Under the heavy-handed guidance of Holsted, the stubborn Darrik spent years as an apprentice butcher, learning his trade at first begrudgingly. Deep down, the dream of being a Guard refused to die. In the first two years Holsted and Darrik often quarrelled for, although Darrik performed his duties with dwarven attention to detail, the young dwarf was still of a mind to be contrary. To Holsted's credit, the man never discharged the young dwarf from his care, though over the years Darrik gave the man plenty of cause. But Holsted believed that sense could be knocked into people, although Darrik's skull was more resilient to being boxed around the ears, and the young dwarf was frequently inclined to give as good as he got.
Over time the two came an understanding, not through agreement, but through mutual respect for each other's strength of conviction. Arguments became verbal, and less heated, as Darrik improved his craft. By the time Darrik qualified for his Journeyman's status, Holsted and the dwarf had become as close to friends as circumstances would allow them. In his journeyman years, the aging Holsted began to teach the dwarf more about the mercantile side of running a butchery. As the old butcher put it: "It ain't all 'bout cuttin' flesh, Darrik. It's about pressin' flesh - shakin' hands with the folks what're goin' to buy from you, as well as those what will be selling to you. Meat don't magically appear in your coldroom, customers don't magically come to your door, and merchants don't miraculously come out o'the woodworks with offers of livestock for the butchering, ye ken?"
Darrik's apprenticeship lasted longer than that of most humans, a deliberate choice by Holsted. Likewise the duration of Darrik's status as Journeyman. The old man wasn't a puradyne himself, but knew Marn folks would be more likely to buy from a human than a dwarf - the only way his apprentice would get a fair hearing was if he was better than the rest. For his part, Darrik didn't mind. The obsessive and fickle personality of his youth had settled over the first three decades as apprentice and Journeyman, and the dwarf was content to work under Holsted, especially when the man's age started to impair his ability to handle the more onerous tasks which faced a butcher. In the later stages of his training as a Journeyman, Darrik became Holsted's business partner in all but name, performing the bulk of the physical work. Holsted repaid Darrik's loyalty by helping the dwarf become part and parcel of his own business connections, introducing him to merchants and farmers, ensuring the dwarf would have suitable references when the time came for him to set up his own butchery as a master of his craft.
In the end it was Holsted's human lifespan which cut their partnership short and the dying man, lacking any surviving kin of his own, bequeathed his business to Darrik, Darrik's wife Hylde, and the toddler Henrik.
==A love lost: Hylde==
Darrik doesn't talk about Hylde a lot. Nor does Henrik.
Folks who ask find their questions diverted to other topics.
To talk about Hylde now was to invite the most recent memories, and those horrors which tore the heart out of their family.
But in silence, and mutual understanding, Darrik and Henrik honour the good memories: of which there were many.
Darrik met Hylde as a young adult (in Dwarven terms), when Darrik was in his early fifties, during the mid-stages of his Journeyman period. Hylde worked at the paper mill in the industrial section of Marn where Darrik used to by Holsted's butcher paper. It took less than a week for the two to find excuses to see each other outside of work.
A lot of dwarves take romance slow: they have the time, after all. The more conservative of the elders in Darrik's community maintain it takes a good decade to properly get to know someone well enough to justify marriage. So it was almost a scandal in the dwarven community when the pair were married within the year. Henrik appeared within two years of that, when Darrik was only fifty-four. It was cause for both scandal and celebration.
Darrik was a good father, dwarven folks agreed. Brought Henrik up in proper dwarf fashion, even if he did impart some of his own strange outlooks on the boy. Hylde, it was agreed even more, was a much better mother. Twenty years passed, in a household filled with work, love, laughter, and the occasional intense philosophical debate. Henrik proved a dab hand at the butcher's trade when Darrik started him on his apprenticeship - Darrik still had his dream, deep down, but wasn't going to pursue it unless the shop was in order and under proper skilled management.
When Hylde died, almost eight years prior, Darrik lost a lot of his humour. Henrik aged almost a decade overnight. They won't talk about it, but community gossip frequently comes up with phrases along the lines of "Tragic. They didn't even find the killer" and "...it was the work of a beast, they say. All clawed up. Terrible."
But people did notice that, when the topic of mutants and magic came up, Darrik went all stonefaced and got an icy feel about him which hinted of deeply constrained anger.
Darrik doesn't talk about Hylde a lot. Nor does Henrik.
But neither have forgotten. And Henrik hopes Darrik finds the bastard thing which shredded his mother, now that Darrik is in the Guard.
==Guards! Guards!==
Dwarves are patient. Darrik didn't take the loss of Hylde as a catalyst to immediately go tearing off to join the guard like a fool. He got his business in order first. He finished Henrik's training, taught his boy good and proper, and Henrik passed the journeyman test at age twenty-two, only two years after Hylde's passing.
Darrik had discussed with Henrik his plan to join the guard. Henrik encouraged it. Both hoped they'd get some closure one day if Darrik succeeded. So Henrik pulled his weight properly, and Darrik was free to pursue the new career.
It wasn't easy at first. Took almost a month of constant daily approaches to the Guard recruitment office before the dwarf lucked out, and he was permitted to 'try basic training. If you can handle that, you're in.'
It wasn't basic training, of course. It was the most gruelling course of exercises and activities the sergeant could think up without making it too obvious the dwarf was being constantly hazed in the hopes of scaring him away. But Darrik didn't scare easily. He had decades of hard physical work behind him, a stomach full of fire, and a head full of determination. Darrik outstubborned them. His training was much longer, much harsher, than that of most recruits, but Darrik endured it, learned the lessons.
There was a silver lining, though, to all of it. Darrik came out of the training as fit as an athlete and as tough as old boots. He had a talent for using the buckler, to the point he'd choose weapons specifically for how easily they complemented a buckler in sparring.
Eventually Darrik convinced his superiors to let him carry a warhammer instead of a mace, and a shortsword to accompany his buckler instead of the larger arming swords. Additionally Darrik commissioned a reinforced steel buckler with studded shield boss to accommodate his particularly aggressive use of buckler in combat.
Five years later, and Darrik is still just a basic Guardsman, still pulls the nastier cleanup jobs, and still has to spend more time with battlemages than he has ever wanted to. It's a tough job, but Darrik is a tough dwarf. And sacrifices always have to be made to keep a hold of your dreams.
Darrik Meathandler
Darrik Meathandler
Last edited by Darrik on Tue Aug 06, 2013 12:19 am, edited 6 times in total.
Re: Darrik Meathandler
Flavour text: Nightwatch and Nostalgia
Dabbling with snapshots of history to get a feel for the recent and present-time Darrik, now that he's a guard with a sense of purpose, and no longer just a working-class butcher.
==================================================
Darrik sat on the stool, eyeglass out, watching for movement in the derelict factory. Just as he had been this past week. If there was one thing the dwarven guard was known for, it was patience. The kind of patience which kept mountains standing. There'd been disappearances, bodies found, and word had filtered through that someone had seen suspicious activity in the abandoned factory. The location made sense, was perfect - but the deaths had been spread out, weeks apart. And so Darrik waited, and the silent watchful hours turned the dwarf's mind to the past, as it so often did when unoccupied with more pressing concerns.
===
Darrik the butcher huffed, short of breath, stumpy legs pounding the cobbles with muscles protesting the abuse. He'd expected running around carrying a pack of rocks. Everyone knew sergeants made you do it. Part torture, part fitness training, all in order to scare away the pretenders. Stock standard military abuse, right? What he had not been expecting was having to do it in armour. Turns out, an entirely different range of muscles were used for pulling on a cart full of carcases in comparison to running around in armour laden with a pack of damned rocks. He was two weeks in, and had another six weeks to go - or so he'd been told yesterday. Darrik wasn't sure he even believed the damn Sergeant when he was told 'Of course this is standard procedure. You're the only recruit we're training at the moment. Now quit whining like a bloody girlchild, and get back to it'.
Darrik wasn't stupid, and he could sense a certain amusement from the poker-faced guardsmen who saw the short and solitary recruit running the circuit in armour and pack. Still, he was also sharp enough to know that it wasn't going to be easy for a dwarf, no matter how patriotic, to join the ranks of the guards. And so it was that he had rocks in his pack, dust in his mouth, and a barrowload of dirty words on the tip of his tongue. It was almost meditative, the stream of mild invective which bounced out of Darrik's mouth with each step. The cursing helped combat the armour chafe more than anything else. He'd thought a dog's bite was bad enough, until he'd experienced armour bite. It didn't seem just, Darrik thought, that something designed to protect you from damage could cause so much damn discomfort in its own right.
===
A stirring of shadow steals Darrik's attention from the past, but in the end his vigilance merely gives witness to a rat scurrying along the edges of a wall. Darrik didn't mind the waiting, though. He knew that eventually there would be more excitement than he'd necessarily want, and he'd likely have to knock in heads with the warhammer he'd earned the right to wear instead of the regulation mace.
Weapon training had not been easy for the dwarf. Ever at a disadvantage of reach, Darrik spent weeks getting pounded into the compacted ground of the training area. But the stubborn dwarf always got back up, and kept at it, learning resilience in the school of hard knocks. And in that process Darrik had learned to truly appreciate the buckler as a tool of violence and self preservation.
Darrik's buckler was presently leaning against the stool where the dwarf waited, patiently watching, while his mind carried him backwards in time.
===
Darrick stepped in slantwise, forcibly punching his reinforced buckler up and out, to interrupt and divert the momentum of Mateo's incoming mace. The dwarf's own mace swung backhanded from below in a deceptive arc.
The dwarf had learned, over the preceding year, to treat weapons training with the same single-minded focus he had spent when learning the craft of butchery, and went about his sparring with a calm deliberation. Today he was partnered with Mateo, a lanky human guard standing over six feet in height. Which was typical of the Sergeant, who invariably found the roughest and largest of the guards to train with the dwarf. Admittedly this was, Darrik had always thought, a wise and justifiable way of ensuring that their persistent dwarven recruit either quit, or could stand toe-to-toe with the worst the city had to offer.
To Mateo's credit, he wasn't in the habit of underestimating the dwarf due to racial inferiority, and was unrelenting in his attempts to hammer Darrik into the ground like an errant peg. One of the other reasons, Darrik figured, that the sergeant so often paired the two of them together.
Mateo's own shield moved in the path of the expected mace strike, protecting the hip as the tall man turned to present more shield and less flesh. And indeed, if the hip had been the target and Darrik's mace had struck shield, the dwarf would have been open for a punishing counter. But Darrick's swing was a feint, the dwarf's elbow turning with a flex of bulging arm muscles, sending the mace not sideways to smash into Mateo but to flick up and engage the outside line of Mateo's mace before it could disengage from Darrik's buckler. In the moment of connection Darrik surged forwards, disengaging his buckler and shoulder-charging Mateo's shield, his own mace pulling Mateo's weapon across his shield where it could pose no immediate threat. A moment later, the studded boss of Darrik's buckler impacted into the side of the Guardsman's knee in a vicious left hook.
===
A different kind of impact caused Darrik's attention to flicker his view up and down the road, but it was just another patrol, booted feet pounding the cobbles. Sometimes he envied the street patrols, how they could have a mostly uneventful shift if they made a lot of damn noise. Loud boots were the key to a quiet night, he'd once been told. The presence of guards was sometimes enough to convince criminals to find somewhere else to be. Sure, a crime might still occur... but not there or then. But no, Darrik got the dirty jobs. The cramped jobs. The boring wait-a-lot jobs, and worse of all: the sewer jobs.
Fact was, being short and stocky had certain unfortunate advantages. According to his superiors he was far better suited to trawling the sewer system than his taller compatriots. But given that Darrik wasn't afflicted with squeamishness, after decades of eviscerating carcases and carving them into their component pieces, he didn't particularly mind. Somebody had to do it, after all. For possibly the fiftieth time that night Darrik patted the haft of his warhammer, checked that his butcher's knife and cleaver were still in place. A nervous habit developed as a form of reassurance after his first solo case. Now, that brought back some memories. He'd almost burst with pride when he got called into the sergeant's office for a special assignment.
===
"Alright. You've been a guard for six months now, Darrik. You haven't screwed up a basic patrol yet, which is a pleasant surprise. But now we've got something which calls for a... man of your talents." The sergeant always emphasised 'man' in that fashion. Mainly because Darrik insisted on the term while on duty. Refused to respond to 'Dwarf'. "I'm the man for the job, Sarge, whatever it is. Awaiting orders." The sergeant acknowledged Darrik's crisp salute with a nod. "Right then. We've had three separate reports of people being dragged into the sewers by something. It's all been in old city, all of the missing were drunk, and the witnesses weren't exactly teetotallers. But there's enough reports that we have to take it seriously. So plug your nose, and get ready. There's a place on the edge of the old fort which sells flotsam. You'll know them by being a damn ugly elf. Ugliest I have ever seen."
Four hours later, and Darrik was nose-deep in the foetid smell of the sewers. It was a stupid plan, really. The kind of reckless brilliance that got a man, or dwarf, killed. But Darrik didn't reckon he had much of a choice. The sewers weren't his home, weren't his stomping grounds. He'd get lost if he went exploring, and likely never find a damned thing. But if he behaved like a victim... well now. Bring the predator to the prey, and see if the roles could be reversed. A stupid plan, but clever for all of that. And so there was Darrik, ankle-deep in shit and piss, reeking of the two bottles of whisky he'd poured over himself prior to entering, singing a tavern song badly out of key.
After an hour Darrik was getting damn tired of the act, the constant calling out of "Lucy, are y'there lass? This is a strange place to be taking me to. Does it smell funny to yer? Hehehe funny smell. Did I'ver tellyer tha'joke? Wi'the elf, th'gnome, an'the mage?" All the while the dwarf was in a state of nervous tension, his movements careful, so as to make his own sloshing a regular pattern above which any aberrant noise may well be distinguished. Beneath the disguise of cloak and leathers he currently wore, the dwarf's sweat was cold. In this cramped place, barely illuminated by the small lantern of glow-worms he'd purchased from the shanty-town foragers, Darrik felt fear. The kind of fear which set a chill to his bones, worried at his subconscious, asked him why he wasn't running back to the nearest ladder up as fast as his stumpy legs could take him. But Darrik had an answer for it. Duty. Every step forward in that sewer, he took for Marn, and for the Dwarves of Marn. Duty, and honour. Darrik would single-handedly show them all that Dwarves were more than second-class tradesmen and workers. In Darrik's mind, he had the reputation of his entire race on his shoulders. When men started thinking of Dwarves as Men, well, his job would be done. And he had plenty of time, if he could survive the finer details of the job. Details like this damn creepy sewer.
And then he heard it, a simple sound, but one which sent a chill up his spine. Effluents sloshing out of rhythm. Carefully, Darrik unhooked his buckler from his belt, hooking the small lantern in its place, and drew his kitchen knife. The sound was coming from behind him, which seemed typical. Still, Darrik knew that most things either sped up or slowed down the moment before launching an attack. He just had to wait for that moment, that shift in tempo, if he was to catch this thing by surprise, rather than alert it to the fact he was armed. Feigning nausea, albeit without much need for acting, Darrik paused. The sloshing didn't, growing closer, and closer, accompanied by a rhythmic snuffling sound. Then the moment came, a pause in the snuffling and sloshing. Darrik spun, planting himself in place as only a dwarf could, smashing out buckler at his own neckline, thrusting dagger at groin height. At first he thought it was an orc, for it certainly seemed to be an orc's face which impacted crushingly against his buckler. However the body which, swung by the head's halted momentum, plunged onto the extended dagger was that of a very large rat. Darrik didn't ask questions, merely ripped his knife sideways. It was almost force of habit. An important part of the primary cut to a butcher is preparing the carcase, removing the viscera and blood, ensuring that the meat isn't spoiled. The orcrat let out a guttural scream, half bestial, half comprehensible, all horrific. Darrik, hardened by years of butchercraft, stepped forward, pushing on shield and pulling on dagger, so that the creature fell flat on its back. Several swift and practised movements of blade later left the creature with no means of containing its organs internally, and Darrik stepped back in a hurry. It was grotesque how the strands of intestine, stomach, and other viscera splashed out into the sewer when it tried to regain its feet. Grimly determined to prove a job well done, Darrik cleaned off and sheathed his knife, then unsheathed his cleaver. It was hard in the faint glow of the glow-worm jar to make out the proper physical attributes of the creature, but all quadrupeds shared similarities when it came to butchering them. When the creature finally stopped squirming in its death throes, Darrik dragged it over his boot so as to angle the neck properly. A few heavy blows later, and the orcrat's head was clear of its body. Darrik began the unpleasant walk back to the nearest sewer exit.
===
Darrik kept his eye to the eyeglass, kept his eye on the job. Eventually, the night ended with no sign of the murderer. But there was always tomorrow night. He'd been given a week to test his hypothesis, and he was certain he'd spot something in that time. Besides, it wasn't as if he had a promotion on the line. As a dwarf, he'd likely be a rank-and-file flatfoot for the next hundred years. But that was fine by Darrik. You didn't need a fancy rank to get a job done well. You just needed tenacity, and Darrik had that in spades.
Dabbling with snapshots of history to get a feel for the recent and present-time Darrik, now that he's a guard with a sense of purpose, and no longer just a working-class butcher.
==================================================
Darrik sat on the stool, eyeglass out, watching for movement in the derelict factory. Just as he had been this past week. If there was one thing the dwarven guard was known for, it was patience. The kind of patience which kept mountains standing. There'd been disappearances, bodies found, and word had filtered through that someone had seen suspicious activity in the abandoned factory. The location made sense, was perfect - but the deaths had been spread out, weeks apart. And so Darrik waited, and the silent watchful hours turned the dwarf's mind to the past, as it so often did when unoccupied with more pressing concerns.
===
Darrik the butcher huffed, short of breath, stumpy legs pounding the cobbles with muscles protesting the abuse. He'd expected running around carrying a pack of rocks. Everyone knew sergeants made you do it. Part torture, part fitness training, all in order to scare away the pretenders. Stock standard military abuse, right? What he had not been expecting was having to do it in armour. Turns out, an entirely different range of muscles were used for pulling on a cart full of carcases in comparison to running around in armour laden with a pack of damned rocks. He was two weeks in, and had another six weeks to go - or so he'd been told yesterday. Darrik wasn't sure he even believed the damn Sergeant when he was told 'Of course this is standard procedure. You're the only recruit we're training at the moment. Now quit whining like a bloody girlchild, and get back to it'.
Darrik wasn't stupid, and he could sense a certain amusement from the poker-faced guardsmen who saw the short and solitary recruit running the circuit in armour and pack. Still, he was also sharp enough to know that it wasn't going to be easy for a dwarf, no matter how patriotic, to join the ranks of the guards. And so it was that he had rocks in his pack, dust in his mouth, and a barrowload of dirty words on the tip of his tongue. It was almost meditative, the stream of mild invective which bounced out of Darrik's mouth with each step. The cursing helped combat the armour chafe more than anything else. He'd thought a dog's bite was bad enough, until he'd experienced armour bite. It didn't seem just, Darrik thought, that something designed to protect you from damage could cause so much damn discomfort in its own right.
===
A stirring of shadow steals Darrik's attention from the past, but in the end his vigilance merely gives witness to a rat scurrying along the edges of a wall. Darrik didn't mind the waiting, though. He knew that eventually there would be more excitement than he'd necessarily want, and he'd likely have to knock in heads with the warhammer he'd earned the right to wear instead of the regulation mace.
Weapon training had not been easy for the dwarf. Ever at a disadvantage of reach, Darrik spent weeks getting pounded into the compacted ground of the training area. But the stubborn dwarf always got back up, and kept at it, learning resilience in the school of hard knocks. And in that process Darrik had learned to truly appreciate the buckler as a tool of violence and self preservation.
Darrik's buckler was presently leaning against the stool where the dwarf waited, patiently watching, while his mind carried him backwards in time.
===
Darrick stepped in slantwise, forcibly punching his reinforced buckler up and out, to interrupt and divert the momentum of Mateo's incoming mace. The dwarf's own mace swung backhanded from below in a deceptive arc.
The dwarf had learned, over the preceding year, to treat weapons training with the same single-minded focus he had spent when learning the craft of butchery, and went about his sparring with a calm deliberation. Today he was partnered with Mateo, a lanky human guard standing over six feet in height. Which was typical of the Sergeant, who invariably found the roughest and largest of the guards to train with the dwarf. Admittedly this was, Darrik had always thought, a wise and justifiable way of ensuring that their persistent dwarven recruit either quit, or could stand toe-to-toe with the worst the city had to offer.
To Mateo's credit, he wasn't in the habit of underestimating the dwarf due to racial inferiority, and was unrelenting in his attempts to hammer Darrik into the ground like an errant peg. One of the other reasons, Darrik figured, that the sergeant so often paired the two of them together.
Mateo's own shield moved in the path of the expected mace strike, protecting the hip as the tall man turned to present more shield and less flesh. And indeed, if the hip had been the target and Darrik's mace had struck shield, the dwarf would have been open for a punishing counter. But Darrick's swing was a feint, the dwarf's elbow turning with a flex of bulging arm muscles, sending the mace not sideways to smash into Mateo but to flick up and engage the outside line of Mateo's mace before it could disengage from Darrik's buckler. In the moment of connection Darrik surged forwards, disengaging his buckler and shoulder-charging Mateo's shield, his own mace pulling Mateo's weapon across his shield where it could pose no immediate threat. A moment later, the studded boss of Darrik's buckler impacted into the side of the Guardsman's knee in a vicious left hook.
===
A different kind of impact caused Darrik's attention to flicker his view up and down the road, but it was just another patrol, booted feet pounding the cobbles. Sometimes he envied the street patrols, how they could have a mostly uneventful shift if they made a lot of damn noise. Loud boots were the key to a quiet night, he'd once been told. The presence of guards was sometimes enough to convince criminals to find somewhere else to be. Sure, a crime might still occur... but not there or then. But no, Darrik got the dirty jobs. The cramped jobs. The boring wait-a-lot jobs, and worse of all: the sewer jobs.
Fact was, being short and stocky had certain unfortunate advantages. According to his superiors he was far better suited to trawling the sewer system than his taller compatriots. But given that Darrik wasn't afflicted with squeamishness, after decades of eviscerating carcases and carving them into their component pieces, he didn't particularly mind. Somebody had to do it, after all. For possibly the fiftieth time that night Darrik patted the haft of his warhammer, checked that his butcher's knife and cleaver were still in place. A nervous habit developed as a form of reassurance after his first solo case. Now, that brought back some memories. He'd almost burst with pride when he got called into the sergeant's office for a special assignment.
===
"Alright. You've been a guard for six months now, Darrik. You haven't screwed up a basic patrol yet, which is a pleasant surprise. But now we've got something which calls for a... man of your talents." The sergeant always emphasised 'man' in that fashion. Mainly because Darrik insisted on the term while on duty. Refused to respond to 'Dwarf'. "I'm the man for the job, Sarge, whatever it is. Awaiting orders." The sergeant acknowledged Darrik's crisp salute with a nod. "Right then. We've had three separate reports of people being dragged into the sewers by something. It's all been in old city, all of the missing were drunk, and the witnesses weren't exactly teetotallers. But there's enough reports that we have to take it seriously. So plug your nose, and get ready. There's a place on the edge of the old fort which sells flotsam. You'll know them by being a damn ugly elf. Ugliest I have ever seen."
Four hours later, and Darrik was nose-deep in the foetid smell of the sewers. It was a stupid plan, really. The kind of reckless brilliance that got a man, or dwarf, killed. But Darrik didn't reckon he had much of a choice. The sewers weren't his home, weren't his stomping grounds. He'd get lost if he went exploring, and likely never find a damned thing. But if he behaved like a victim... well now. Bring the predator to the prey, and see if the roles could be reversed. A stupid plan, but clever for all of that. And so there was Darrik, ankle-deep in shit and piss, reeking of the two bottles of whisky he'd poured over himself prior to entering, singing a tavern song badly out of key.
After an hour Darrik was getting damn tired of the act, the constant calling out of "Lucy, are y'there lass? This is a strange place to be taking me to. Does it smell funny to yer? Hehehe funny smell. Did I'ver tellyer tha'joke? Wi'the elf, th'gnome, an'the mage?" All the while the dwarf was in a state of nervous tension, his movements careful, so as to make his own sloshing a regular pattern above which any aberrant noise may well be distinguished. Beneath the disguise of cloak and leathers he currently wore, the dwarf's sweat was cold. In this cramped place, barely illuminated by the small lantern of glow-worms he'd purchased from the shanty-town foragers, Darrik felt fear. The kind of fear which set a chill to his bones, worried at his subconscious, asked him why he wasn't running back to the nearest ladder up as fast as his stumpy legs could take him. But Darrik had an answer for it. Duty. Every step forward in that sewer, he took for Marn, and for the Dwarves of Marn. Duty, and honour. Darrik would single-handedly show them all that Dwarves were more than second-class tradesmen and workers. In Darrik's mind, he had the reputation of his entire race on his shoulders. When men started thinking of Dwarves as Men, well, his job would be done. And he had plenty of time, if he could survive the finer details of the job. Details like this damn creepy sewer.
And then he heard it, a simple sound, but one which sent a chill up his spine. Effluents sloshing out of rhythm. Carefully, Darrik unhooked his buckler from his belt, hooking the small lantern in its place, and drew his kitchen knife. The sound was coming from behind him, which seemed typical. Still, Darrik knew that most things either sped up or slowed down the moment before launching an attack. He just had to wait for that moment, that shift in tempo, if he was to catch this thing by surprise, rather than alert it to the fact he was armed. Feigning nausea, albeit without much need for acting, Darrik paused. The sloshing didn't, growing closer, and closer, accompanied by a rhythmic snuffling sound. Then the moment came, a pause in the snuffling and sloshing. Darrik spun, planting himself in place as only a dwarf could, smashing out buckler at his own neckline, thrusting dagger at groin height. At first he thought it was an orc, for it certainly seemed to be an orc's face which impacted crushingly against his buckler. However the body which, swung by the head's halted momentum, plunged onto the extended dagger was that of a very large rat. Darrik didn't ask questions, merely ripped his knife sideways. It was almost force of habit. An important part of the primary cut to a butcher is preparing the carcase, removing the viscera and blood, ensuring that the meat isn't spoiled. The orcrat let out a guttural scream, half bestial, half comprehensible, all horrific. Darrik, hardened by years of butchercraft, stepped forward, pushing on shield and pulling on dagger, so that the creature fell flat on its back. Several swift and practised movements of blade later left the creature with no means of containing its organs internally, and Darrik stepped back in a hurry. It was grotesque how the strands of intestine, stomach, and other viscera splashed out into the sewer when it tried to regain its feet. Grimly determined to prove a job well done, Darrik cleaned off and sheathed his knife, then unsheathed his cleaver. It was hard in the faint glow of the glow-worm jar to make out the proper physical attributes of the creature, but all quadrupeds shared similarities when it came to butchering them. When the creature finally stopped squirming in its death throes, Darrik dragged it over his boot so as to angle the neck properly. A few heavy blows later, and the orcrat's head was clear of its body. Darrik began the unpleasant walk back to the nearest sewer exit.
===
Darrik kept his eye to the eyeglass, kept his eye on the job. Eventually, the night ended with no sign of the murderer. But there was always tomorrow night. He'd been given a week to test his hypothesis, and he was certain he'd spot something in that time. Besides, it wasn't as if he had a promotion on the line. As a dwarf, he'd likely be a rank-and-file flatfoot for the next hundred years. But that was fine by Darrik. You didn't need a fancy rank to get a job done well. You just needed tenacity, and Darrik had that in spades.
