Born a Monster

Chaper One

Of Before

My scribe insists this chapter is needed, in case the reader is unaware of or cannot obtain a copy of my earlier work.

My name is Rhishisikk, and due to a poorly worded oath in my youth, I am forever a Truthspeaker.

While the first class of any person normally grants them a thousand development points, in my case I was also insane for those first three days.

So in addition to a series of classes chosen for reasons I didn’t understand, I got an Inherent Longevity of 12 ranks. In common terms, every 4096 years or so I would age one year.

.....

Fortunately, as a Protean shapeshifter, I wasn’t stuck in a child’s body or a child’s mind. But it did add to my divisor.

For those with only one class, a divisor is exactly what it sounds like. If I were to perform an action that would grant you 25 or so experience, I would only gain one.

This was most frustrating to my caretaker at the time, the Child of Anansi, or spider king, Eihtfuhr.

From his care, I was taken as a work captive by the centaur clan that killed him.

In their employ, I spent a few weeks infiltrating a goblin lair, which was eventually destroyed by a team of heroes.

Perhaps I should cover that. People with five or more levels in their primary class are called Champions or Experts. Ten or more levels qualified one for the title Hero or Master.

People claim these titles without earning them; that is just the nature of sentient beings.

But heroes are not cheap; the cost of hiring them was, well, me. I was sold to humans, specifically the Guild of Guardsmen, Porters, Drovers, and Linkboys of Narrow Valley.

For obvious reasons, this is called by the Guild, or the Guild of the Long and Needlessly Complex Name.

Due to the lack of deep skills and advanced abilities, I was limited to the most basic of work, generally supporting adventurers or even our own Guild guardsmen.

Because I was an idiot, I managed to swear myself to two quests in that time, one to attempt an assassination of my current employer, Rakkal. Among things of interest, Rakkal is a male, a minotaur, and the wielder of the Legendary Axe, one of the twelve Legendary weapons.

Normally, the Legendary Heroes have to be summoned from other worlds. Due to a quirk of his birth, that he was without the Systems the rest of us are born with, Rakkal was able to become the Axe Hero.

Having decided that it was his destiny to rule an empire, Rakkal began expanding what would come to be known as the Red Tide. The Uruk, or orcish warriors, he was recruiting to his cause at the time took exception and bent the rules of their own honor code to get a team of heroes to slay him.

In spite of what we could do, those heroes failed, and with one exception, died.

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Rather than kill me, Rakkal purchased my contract. Turns out, that’s a thing.

The problem is, he thinks my abilities are about double what they actually are.

Well, okay, the problem is that I’ve actually kinda performed somewhat in that area.

For example, I brought some stolen plans from another city-state and actually unlocked a class called Industrialist in making the things into reality.

Oh, and by freeing some very powerful beings from poorly designed prisons, I seem to have started a civil war there. Or maybe it’s a religious schism.

Whatever. My bottom line is they want me dead, so I’m inclined not to go visit.

So, somehow, this was deemed an immense success. Another ambassador’s task was assigned to me.

When you hear the name the Southern Isles, you think of exotic fruits like lemons, bananas, coffee, and sugar cane.

And you’d be right, those are things traders export from there.

Bards make the southern islands out to be an archipelago, a series of small islands, each having a village of happy natives. And maybe the northern part is.

I’m looking at a map now that has some... more substantial islands. As in one of them is some hundred miles long and about half that at its thickest point. Generally, they stretch north-ish to south-ish, but there are exceptions.

Perhaps the most troubling part of this map is the WORK IN PROGRESS in the southwest corner.

I understand that there are a number of volcanoes, that much of the terrain is lush jungle, and that there are cannibal pygmies.

We sail there from the pastoral nation of Furdia (large enough to actually have a city, not a town with pretentions) on a multiple-mast ship called the Wanton Sharkbite.

Captaine (female captain) Levemont runs a crew of a few hundred, essentially a floating village. Just turning this wooden monster is an act that requires coordination and expertise.

Daily, Kismet (self-proclaimed female explorer-adventurer) the Mwarri (a race of bipedal feline descent) and I helped the crew with the process of holystoning and swabbing the deck.

Although you are probably familiar with swabbing, let me explain holystoning.

To keep as much water as possible out of the inside of the ship, resin and tar are heated and poured into the places between cracks. Well, this leaves small bumps when they cool down. To level the deck, blocks of sandstone, called holystones because of the posture needed to use them properly, were used to make the deck as level as possible.

Kismet’s favorite is “the Bear”, named after the growling sound it makes as it is moved across the deck. It takes both of us to move it. She actually brags about pushing a bear around the deck.

This leaves little bits of crud everywhere, and so the deck needs to be swabbed, or mopped. This part of the process, the bards speak of.

But currently, I have put away my “fancy duds”, and am wearing patched linen, like the rest of the crew.

#

I rubbed my eyes. Kismet took to the nautical terminology, and the rest of shipboard life, with the gusto she brought to everything.

I had finally finished the prelude to this work, which I have titled “Servant of the Axe”. I had not often been accused of creativity.

But it was near breakfast time, and that meant chopping onions and grinding peppercorn for the soup. Food on ships is difficult to come by. You’d think salted fish and meats, but in truth it was mostly bread and oatmeal, laced with such plants as would keep for weeks.

There were tiny slices of hard cheese for nutritional needs, as well as nuts and fried insects. But these were treats and luxuries, not everyday fare.

The rats on board were the sole property of Missus, a beige tomcat the mass of both my lower legs. Oddly, she didn’t seem to like Kismet, who normally got along with animals better than I did.

When we had sardines (a type of paltry fish, common in the southern waters), Missus was also entitled to the heads, which she nibbled on and took the remains to whatever crew member she favored that day.

There were no sardines with breakfast. Oats, potatoes, onions, ground peppercorn. Six nutrition per serving, but the bowls held six servings instead of four. Active as we were, there was a noon ration of bread, usually hard-tack to keep it from going bad.

For dinner, it was usually fish stew, with the same vegetables and spices. When the fishing hadn’t produced enough to make a stew, lengths of jerked meat were pulled from ship stores and used instead.

This wasn’t any desire for drudgery on the part of the cooks. When they could, they had pickles, or preserved berries, or other treats, but these were normally broken out only on Gluttonday and alternating Wrathdays and Lustdays.

The first two days out of port, the food was actually pretty good. But, there are a limited number of foods that will keep for weeks. Like all ships, we drug nets behind us to catch fish, but the “bounty of the sea” that bards sing of... well, Fisherman is a profession for a reason.

On that topic, the crew was more varied of class than one would suspect. I mean, almost all of them had unlocked Sailor just doing odd jobs around the ship; being ready for any job needed was just part of shipboard life.

But we had Archers and Dancers and two Surgeons. We had Singers and Acrobats and Cooks. We even had a blacksmith, although she only plied her trade while we were in port.

There were other classes with less savory roots among the crew, but for the most part they left Kismet and I alone, and were not an annoyance to the crew.

For the most part.

But for the first six days, it was smooth sailing.

On Envyday, the storm was spotted.

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