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. !DSPAM:4f96b0cc61221804284693!