[Mkguild] Part 1 of Changing Fortunes

[Daniel Michalek]

 Here is part 1 of my final draft (hopefully, it's the third one) of my
story. Comments are greatly appreciated. Hope you enjoy it!

KillerNarwhal


Changing Fortunes



Chip’ang Koniko trudged in silence beside the caravan wagon as it rolled
over the rough dirt road. He wondered whether anything interesting would
happen anytime soon. Ever since the Reapers attacked his troupe of
performing acrobats and mercilessly slaughtered everyone he had ever held
dear, he had been forced to find other source of livelihood. Being out in
the wilderness and woods narrowed his choice down to the default occupation
and the only one available: mercenary. He was employed by a wealthy
merchant to help guard his caravan from bandits and Lutins, so at the
moment he couldn’t afford to be lost in that dreadful stupor of misery that
engulfed him whenever he thought of home.



Heh. Home. His home had been a group of wagons that carried his fellow
acrobats and other performers and their equipment, traveling on the open
road and performing for every town they came across. Not that it was his
real home, for the acrobat had a rough and sad childhood. He had been
orphaned at a few years of age by a plague that struck the land of his
birth of which he never learned the name, and killed his parents, even when
they fled many miles away to a bustling port city. They had barely been
able to secure passage across the sea when they succumbed to the disease.
The captain of the ship on which they had booked their passage felt sorry
for the jet black-haired and slant-eyed boy and promised to take Cheep on
the voyage anyway and find him a home with some friends he had on the other
side the Western Sea in Isenport. There the captain brought young Chip’ang.
He had almost nothing to carry as his parents had impoverished themselves
with their travels and left him with the clothes he wore and nothing else
but a small jade monkey statue. The captain’s friends showed great delight
at adding a fourth child to their household, but Cheep quickly learned that
their enthusiasm was a façade; he was treated almost as a slave, and given
a workload several times larger than that of his adopted brothers. All in
the house treated him with condescension, usually giving him another task
every time they happened to see him. He cried himself to sleep at the
injustice of it, but he was never granted a reprieve, and the old captain
who had been so kind had left soon after seeing him here and could not help
him.



He lived this way miserably for several years, all the while gaining skill
at avoiding certain people, even to the extent of climbing houses and trees
and diving through windows to escape. From a sneak thief, one of the few
people who would actually talk to him, he learned to pick locks. This
knowledge he traded for allowing him to rob the house he stayed in, since
he had no love for its other occupants; the man had come creeping through
the cellar where he slept on a rough straw mat, almost tripping over the
boy in surprise and giving himself away. The boy just looked at him and
wondered how he had gotten in. The man stared back, and eventually he
arrived at the aforementioned arrangement after seeing that Cheep was
treated terribly and probably didn’t deserve to be here.



His life changed drastically one day when he heard news of a group of
people who made their living traveling and entertaining people with their
skills at acrobatics and music, and that they were in his village! He
managed to finish the chores required to keep his adopted father from
beating him and sneaked off quickly to see them and what they did. After
watching them practice their trade from the shadows of an alley, completely
mesmerized by the things they did, he began to wonder if he could do these
things too. And so when he returned home just barely in time to avoid a
beating for being late, he tried to teach himself to tumble just like these
performers did. He had just gotten the hang of cartwheels when his adoptive
father saw him cavorting about in the grass and gave him a sound beating
and a warning not to do such idiotic things. Even if he was an idiot, he
shouldn’t act like it. With only a few tears, he waited until he left and
then sneaked off again to ask the performers to teach him to tumble.
Entertained themselves at the request to teach this scrawny youth, the
performers agreed. He was thin and flexible, already having a good amount
of agility from the darting into shadows to avoid his cruel family, so the
acrobats were impressed at the speed at which he picked up tricks. One of
them, a tall young man named Borin, asked him about his family and learned
with horror at the conditions he had been staying in. He asked him if he
wanted to join them and leave his pitiful excuse for a life behind. Eyes
wide and jaw dropped, the boy enthusiastically agreed once he recovered
from the shock at his sudden good fortune.



The next day, as the performers left the town, Cheep was with them, along
with a small leather pouch full of coins he had found when he picked the
lock on his foster-father’s strongbox. He had taken a couple handfuls of
coin as recompense for six years of labor and felt no guilt for the theft.
He had run away before, so he knew his ‘father’ would be positively
seething with rage when he came to beat him in the morning when his
numerous chores were discovered undone. He left a false clue trail that led
to the woods so the cruel man would hopefully give up and assume he had
been killed by wild animals and eventually forget about him. But none of
that mattered much anymore: Cheep was finally *free*! He wriggled in
delight beneath the *actual blanket* he had been given by the performers,
unable to sleep even though exhausted.



Over the next few years, Chip’ang Koniko learned the ways of the performing
acrobat: all their flips, tumbles, juggling, and swinging from tall frames
they set up wherever they went, and he also mastered certain skills to
defend their valuables from bandits. He learned to fight with his bare
hands and feet, utilizing force through his limbs to sunder wooden boards
as well as strike with dizzying speed. He was trained to attack and defend
with a long wooden staff, as well as a curious weapon he was given by his
new family: a pair of short wooden staves held together at the ends with an
equally short piece of leather cord; these were called *nunchukas. *He
excelled in learning anything anybody had to teach him, especially Borin,
and quickly became literate and showed prodigious skill at making rhymes
and puns. It was the happiest time of his life. Sure, there were the
occasional stupid bandits who didn’t have a clue who they were dealing with
until they woke up a few hours later, caravan gone, almost naked and
hogtied, with welts and bruises covering their bodies. But overall, life
was good. Performing tricks and saying funny things to entertain people
brought him a kind of satisfaction he had never even dreamed of before.



And then one day it all ended. They had just left the last village a couple
of days before and were now travelling north on a dirt road that cut
through the woods. They had been warned about bandits in the area, but they
couldn’t have been ready for the attack. The first warning Cheep had was a
wicked-looking arrow flying out of the trees and impaling the throat of the
man that had acted as both elder brother and father to the young man since
he was eight. Borin couldn’t even cry out before his eyes widened and he
slumped down in his seat on the wagon, breathing his last even as his life
drained away before Cheep’s eyes. Cheep gaped in horror that quickly turned
to fear and then rage at any who could be so sneaky as to remain undetected
and so cruel as to strike down his brother in such a cowardly way. The
other performers soon shouted in alarm and pulled out their staffs and
nunchukas and a few throwing stars. The attackers who soon poured into
sight were not average bandit, but some of the most dangerous anywhere: the
kind with good armor and weapons and obvious military training.



Cheep had his nunchukas out seconds after all this had happened and joined
his fellow acrobats in the fray, whipping the two-piece weapon about in
vicious arcs, deflecting swords and arrows and cracking these malicious
miscreants on the head and elsewhere, snapping bones under the force of
this new emotion of rage. The bandits no longer had the element of
surprise, and quickly found that these fierce humans with their odd weapons
were a force to be reckoned with; they found themselves almost evenly
matched, even with the numbers in their favor. Unused to combat with such
weapons, the bandits were disadvantaged for a few minutes, and several fell
to the defenders before they regrouped and formed another attack. The
acrobats were not unscathed; after the initial arrow killed Borin, they had
lost two more to arrows and six to long blades held by the bandits. Cheep
and four other performers had survived the initial onslaught, but they
couldn’t hold them off much longer; the bandits were clearly going to win..
They had begun shooting flaming arrows at the wagons to demoralize the
acrobats further. Another acrobat was felled by the bandits, when suddenly
they heard a commotion back in the distance: another caravan, this one a
well-guarded trader’s, was coming up the path and a dozen of the hired
swords ran to help the dwindling troupe of acrobats. Their coming was
almost too late, however; Cheep’s three living companions had become two,
and then one, before the guards arrived to join the fight. Their numbers
made the seven or so remaining attackers flee into the woods. Cheep looked
at the guards with exhaustion and agony and he collapsed to the ground. All
went dark.


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