Chapter 7: DD2 Chapter 001 – Charisma

Eliza awoke to the unpleasant sensation of a small, wet tongue lapping against her face. The hot, fetid breath of a carnivore blowing its way up her nose rudely ruined those blissful few moments of not-quite-wakefulness that shielded Eliza from the harsh realities of her waking life. Blearily she wiped the sleep from her eyes and pushed Thanatos off of her chest, the old tomcat hissing loudly in protest as it was forcibly removed from its warm seat and onto the old floorboards of her bedroom. The predictable consequences of his actions were unpalatable to her feline roommate. 

“I’m awake, you cantankerous old bastard,” Eliza grumbled, her normally smooth voice rough and strained from another long night of singing, drinking and smoking the variety of semi-legal substances that were always on offer at any party worthy of the name. 

Name: Eliza The Bard

Species: Human

Age: 49

HP: 240/240

SP: 227/240

MP: 0/0

Strength: 10

Dexterity: 20

Vitality: 24

Intelligence: 0

Willpower: 0

Charisma: 45

Class: Baldric Troubadour - Level 42

Troubadour’s Ear - Level 42

Troubadour’s Instrument - Level 42

Troubadour’s Presence - Level 42

Troubadour’s Voice - Level 42

Troubadour’s Ear Level 42 - You may apply this skill’s level + your charisma score as a modifier to the range and volumes of sound that you can safely perceive. Additionally you may choose to ignore, or focus on specific sounds with perfect clarity.

Troubadour’s Instrument Level 42 - You may add this skill’s level to your dexterity score whilst wielding any instrument. Additionally, wielded instruments gain an increase to their durability as if they were affected by your vitality score and you gain an improved understanding of timing in relation to affected instruments. 

Troubadour’s Presence Level 42 - You may add this skill’s level to your charisma score and gain the use of a crude aura with a range limited by your effective charisma score. For the purposes of holding attention, the charisma bonus provided by this skill is doubled. 

Troubadour’s Voice Level 42 - You may add this skill’s level + charisma score as a modifier to the range and volumes of sound that you can produce. Additionally you may choose to spend stamina to achieve perfect control over emitted sounds and imbue understandable concepts into sound.

“Not yet…” she told Thanatos, her status yet to update her age as she braced herself for approaching the big five-zero. 

Today was her birthday and she had spent her last night as a woman in her forties doing everything in her power to ensure that she forgot about the looming anniversary. Unfortunately, her brilliant plan of sleeping through the day had been ruined by her cat’s need to eat his breakfast. The prodigiously fat old creature was unwilling to miss out on a single one of his regularly scheduled meals. It was greedy really, inconsiderate too, as she knew for a fact that half the spinsters on her street sneaked him extra meals and no-one was lining up to do the same for her. Her empty stomach grumbling to emphasise her point, she turned her mind towards making breakfast for them both. 

Eliza clambered out of bed, her clothes hanging off her lithe body as she stumbled across the creaking floorboards in search of catfood. She supposed she should be grateful—if she lived in virtually any other town in Creation, then her back would be bent and wrinkles would line her face, but here in Rhelea, for good or ill, everyone had classes. With a vitality score of 24, she didn’t look or even feel thirty. Still, the time was fast approaching when she would have to gain levels again or bite the sword and try to find another city to live in. Men could get by as bards until their voices failed them, but in Rhelea women’s careers typically petered out as soon as the first lines started to appear around their eyes and given her unique set of circumstances she couldn’t allow that to happen. 

As much as the threat of aging worried her, she was currently flush with cash for the first time in years and Thanatos’s waistline was certainly feeling the benefit. Her song ‘Typh The Dragon's Wife’ had enjoyed a late resurgence in popularity when the self-same dragon led a horde of ratlings to destroy the much hated Lord Traylan’s castle. The success of the song meant that for the first time in years, she was being paid to play in taverns. Not much, but the mere fact alone was remarkable considering how half-hearted her initial bout of songwriting had been. She alone had made Typh the most famous adventurer in the city below bronze and after the dragon attack she was probably the most famous below iron, even if few people could put a face to her name.

It wasn’t something she was particularly proud of. Because of her song, even though Typh was a mage and the Dragonrider was warrior tagged, half of Rhelea thought that Typh was the mysterious Dragonrider who had tamed the Stunted Dragon with her womanly wiles. Which was a polite way to say it was her fault people thought she had fucked a dragon into subservience, a frankly ludicrous idea. 

It was also a very dangerous belief, especially since Lord Traylan had returned to Rhelea and issued a bounty on the Dragonrider’s head. Twelve-and-a-half-thousand gold talents made it the largest bounty for a human in Terythia’s history, matching the one issued by the Royal Alchemists Guild for the Stunted Dragon's live capture. If that wasn’t enough of an incentive the old patriarch had declared his intention to formally adopt whoever killed the Dragonrider, making them the sole heir to Rhelea and its surrounding territories. The combined bounty was so large that it had drawn adventurers from all over Astresia to try their luck and more than a few of them were steel-ranked. 

Eliza knew that there was a song in that somewhere, but nobody was talking, and try as she might, her best attempts had failed to yield anything that didn’t feel bland or derivative. Hopefully, when the Dragonrider was eventually unmasked, inspiration would strike her. If not, she could always just make it dirty. It wasn’t exactly the best use of her talents but it certainly paid the bills.

She poured some chunks of dried meat into Thanatos’s bowl, rehydrated them with water from a clay jug and stood back as she watched the little pest happily dig into his breakfast. Her cat's hissing fit was quickly forgotten as he noisily munched away at his very-late-morning feast, spraying her clean floorboards with half chewed flakes of meat. The smell caused a wave of nausea to run through Eliza as she swayed slightly before finding refuge in a chair. As cute as Thanatos was when he ate, she had earned herself enough scratches over the years to know better than to risk petting him. Instead, she was content to sit as still as humanly possible while she nursed her hangover and contemplated getting drunk again to better pass the ignoble day.

“Oh Thanatos, you’re the only man for me," she grumbled and she meant it.

“Really? I take offense at that.” 

Eliza froze in her chair. Her heart skipped a beat as she fought against her familiar terror. A flood of adrenaline instantly banished her hangover to the furthest recesses of her mind as she forced herself not to scream or to cry out for help. 

That never worked. Resisting only ever brought her more pain. 

She felt her fingers beg to dance along the neck of her violin, a song about fright, murder and torment in the works as her class tried to turn the source of her anguish into inspiration, the words in her mind contorting themselves into a song until she smothered the urge with her will. 

Eliza had gone through this so many times before and had survived him up until now. She reminded herself that there was no reason for that to change today, she could be good. All she had to do was stick to the script and soon he’d be out of her hair and she could go back to pretending that he wasn’t in control of her life. With a monumental amount of effort and [Troubadour’s Presense] pulsing with stamina she forced a smile onto her face and tried her best to give him the vacant ‘come-fuck-me look’ that he liked so much as she turned around to face Riyoul.

Riyoul The Smiling Knife, a founding member of the famous Shining Swords, her longtime ‘paramour’, ‘protector’ and ‘patron’. A rogue so skilled he could bypass the doors of a century old dungeon, so stealthy that he could walk through a monster nest undetected and so deadly that he could kill a basilisk from over 200 feet away with a lazily thrown knife. And of course all of these feats of skill were far easier to replicate when your intended target was a hungover bard in her fifties who lived alone with her overweight cat.

People never really thought about what it was like to live in an adventurer town, what free classes for all really meant. The prospect of living for centuries in the prime of your youth, casting spells, or casually juggling boulders gave Rhelea a broad appeal to the downtrodden masses of Terythia. But the sort of people who were particularly attracted to combat classes when they had other, safer options, were in her opinion the last people who should be allowed to take them. While she didn’t doubt for a moment the veracity of the horrors and abuses that the unclassed suffered at the hands of their noble lords, she simply wasn’t convinced that anarchy was the solution to that particular problem. 

Everything she knew about the system suggested that naturally violent people benefited more from gaining combat classes than their cooler-headed counterparts. Those who truly embodied the precepts of their class levelled faster and easier than those who chose them out of sufferance or duty. It was a subtle difference, one that didn’t really show until the higher ranks when classes became more vocal, but it was there and it was enough to ensure that—everything else being equal—the worst kind of people were more likely able to push past levelling plateaus.

As a bard she knew that common folk just wanted to hear nice stories about merry bands of heroes slaying monsters. No one cared about the truth. About how one of their famous heroes was a worse monster than the things he killed, how he abused his system-granted strength to make her life and the lives of the other women he tormented a living hell. How Riyoul was a complete and utter bastard.

“Good morning honey, I didn’t know to expect you," Eliza said smiling sweetly at him, her skill [Troubadour’s Voice] ensuring that her voice stayed light and steady in the face of her fear and [Troubadour’s Presence] stopping her from shaking like a leaf as she projected out a sense of relaxed enjoyment.

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“It’s past midday,” he stated, smiling as he always did. His tone layered with condescension and disapproval as if she didn’t know what time it fucking was. “You look terrible,” he added, because he was a bastard.

“Well, if you refuse to use doors, or at least knock, then you can’t blame a girl for looking a little rough around the edges, especially when you appear unannounced in her living room," she said, softening the rebuke with a laugh as she smoothed out her thin shift, silently wishing that she had been given some time to prepare for his arrival.

“Why would I knock when I’m just entering my own house?” he asked, no hint of shame in his voice as he played the part of a doting lover, even going so far as to lean down and give her a peck on the cheek that very nearly made her puke. 

“If it’s your house then maybe you could pay rent..." she grumbled, too drunk or hungover from the night before to stop herself. 

She yelped in pain and she grasped at her forearm. A thin line of blood welling up from between her fingers from where he cut her.

As usual she neither saw nor heard him move, her perception skill [Troubadour’s Ear] completely failing to warn her of his rapid approach, his drawn knife, or whatever combination of skills he used to part her flesh seemingly without moving. She knew better than to comment on the assault; he certainly wouldn’t. Riyoul was so committed to living in the fiction that he was a good man, that he had never once acknowledged that he hurt her. He had demonstrated before that he was perfectly content to carry out a one sided conversation with her as she struggled to resist passing out in a pool of her own blood. 

The fucking sadist.

“Can I get you something to eat?” she asked, hoping that if she prayed hard enough that his ludicrously high stats wouldn’t prevent him from possibly choking to death.

“No thank you, I won’t be staying long. I have a job for you,” he said casually, a pit of dread forming in her stomach. 

“Oh?”

Eliza made a point of never saying no to him. No matter what Riyoul asked of her, the implicit threat of violence was more than enough to get her to go along with his schemes. The fact that his jobs were usually quite profitable helped as well, the coin often letting her drown out her guilt and shame for weeks at a time. She was just grateful that he had stopped coming to her for sex years ago; he kept other more willing girls for that.

“My teammate Mara had a chat with an Inquisitor the other day,” he admitted nonchalantly like it was the most normal thing in Creation. “And it turns out that the King is quite interested in finding your favourite dragon's wife. Naturally lacking an inquisitive bone in her body, Mara turned it over to me and being the natural talent that I am, I found her,” he continued, pausing for a moment like he expected her to fucking applaud him. “Now I’m supposed to pass this information along but it doesn’t sit right. Nothing about Typh ever has, not with me at least, and now that I find her at level 49 just sitting on a rank up, I know that my gut was right.”

“That’s impossible!” she blurted out, jealousy gnawing at her. The girl had gotten her class on the same day that Riyoul had told her to write the song. If he wasn’t lying—and why would he lie abouts this?—then Typh had made it to peak pewter inside of a season, whereas Eliza had been stuck at level 42 for years, passively levelling since hitting the stat interval at 40, when Riyoul had put a very memorable stop to her adventuring career. That her decade and a half of toil and torment could be surpassed before one of her more lacklustre songs even finished doing the rounds terrified her, and from the way Riyoul was acting, it even rattled him. 

Typh had secrets, big ones. Potentially big enough to buy her way free and clear of Riyoul if she played this right. If he ever suspected that she was being less than perfectly loyal, she knew that he would disappear her, like he did to so many other girls.

“I don't see what you want me to do,” she added, carefully choosing her words as she trusted in her skill to keep her tone light and even.

“I’m getting to that. I want you to get close to her, to find out how she got to her level, everything she knows about the Stunted Dragon, any clue that could lead me to the Dragonrider or how to replicate the feat,” he said, casually asking her to milk Typh for information that would make Riyoul rich enough to retire with all the privileges of a lord. 

“Okay, but why are you asking me to do this? I doubt she’ll even talk to me. She must have heard the song by now and I can’t imagine that she’ll want to spill her secrets, especially not to me of all people," she asked, wondering what else was at play.

“I think you’d be surprised. By the way she’s drinking her way into a coma every night, I don’t think you’ll find it that hard to worm your way close to her. She’s lonely and if I had to guess by the way that warrior isn’t hanging around her, recently single. Just use your gods-given assets and pretend to like it when she takes you to bed. Pillowtalk used to be your bread and butter after all.” 

“Thanks...” she said, trying and ultimately failing not to think of her time on the row before Riyoul had plucked her from obscurity. Self-recriminating thoughts of how naive she had been for once thinking herself lucky as she traded in her pimp for the murderer now standing before her.

Looking back, she knew that she should never have taken Riyoul up on his offer. At the time she had thought herself walking along a deadly tightrope, always one wrong move away from her clients going after her for divulging their secrets on the information market. But with the benefit of hindsight, she realised that the secrets she traded were rarely worth more than a handful of drachma, and nobody would have risked the guard or her brothel’s bouncers to punish a prostitute for relaying information that had been freely given. She had traded what was working itself into being a powerful information broker class into being Riyoul’s pet bard, someone to sing the man's praises and worm her way into places that he wouldn’t quite fit in. Usually so he could kill someone who rarely deserved it.

“You’ll find her here pretty much all day,” Riyoul said, tossing her a crumpled up piece of paper. “Although I would take a bath first if I were you,” he added, the insult going almost unnoticed amidst her fear.

Then she blinked and he was gone.

Eliza knew better than to assume that just because she couldn’t see him, Riyoul had actually left her flat. The man often chose to stay and watch her unseen, depending on his mood. So rather than cry or rage as she so desperately wanted to do, she kept her stamina running through her skills, her composure maintained through the grace of the system as she carefully bent down to retrieve the piece of paper from the floor. She was careful not to stain it with her bloody fingertips as she memorised the tavern's name and address scrawled on the note before setting it aside and going to retrieve her first aid kit. 

Riyoul’s cuts were usually so perfect that they rarely needed stitches and this one was no exception; a bandage would be more than enough to ensure that it healed nicely, leaving her with yet another long pale scar to add to the collection decorating her forearms.

When she eventually felt steady enough to leave, Eliza put on her thick fur coat and boots and left the safety of her flat with Thanatos purring to himself contentedly on the warm spot she had left on her chair. The short climb down the stairs gave her all the time she needed to affix a more natural smile to her face as she stepped onto the snow-covered streets of Rhelea, where the milling crowds had long since turned the powdered white snow into an unpleasant muddy slurry.

Normally at this time of year the temples would be out in force collecting donations for the homeless who would otherwise freeze to death in the wintery weather, but this year was different. The streets had been practically cleared, the fit and able-bodied press-ganged into Lord Traylan’s new army, with the others presumably banished to the slums beyond the walls. A development which was causing big waves even if it was easily the least offensive of the new changes.

Her breath frosted the air as she walked, and she stopped off along the way to hand over a few chalkoi for a hot drink—one that was admittedly mostly whisky—and a stick of mint to chew on to take the edge off of her breath.

A priest perched precariously on an old crate was harassing those few people who passed him by on the streets. Raving about the Epherian Angel and the end times, something no sane person would believe, although from the hint of his well-hidden accent, she did spare a moment's thought at wondering why a priest from Epheria had come so far east. Surely there were street corners aplenty within Pallas and the rest of the empire.

The tavern on the note was in the poorer side of town that Eliza rarely ventured to. The patrons of those bars simply didn’t have the coin or the inclination for a bard of her talents. It was nestled on a quiet road along the edge of the Crafters Village where the poor typically resided. Anti-Traylan posters were liberally plastered along the length of the street, some affixed far more haphazardly than others. Not one drew a crowd as everyone had learnt from experience what Lord Traylan’s soldiers would do to you if they came to believe that you were responsible for the graffiti and slander that was cropping up all over Rhelea.

Without skipping a beat she walked past the posters and into the tavern, stepping over a drunk man passed out in the snow to do so. It was dark inside, the windows so clouded over with dirt that even with the full brightness of the day shining on them the interior still looked dingy and drab. Eliza wrinkled her nose as she tried not to inhale the fetid scents of alcoholism and despair, the total lack of conversation amongst the bar's many patrons telling her all she needed to know about the clientele who frequented it this early in the afternoon.

Eliza didn’t have to look for long to find her. Typh was sitting at the bar, clearly wallowing in silence as she drank what looked like whisky by the pint. The level 49 mageling was so deep into her cups that it would impress most vitality-heavy warriors. She stuck out like a sore thumb, too pretty, too well dressed and with a level that was far too high for this part of town.

Typh was smaller than Eliza had thought she would be, but the woman was, if anything, more striking than she had been described. Strong cheekbones, full lips, light brown skin, with tits and hips that certainly drew the eye and were far too large for her otherwise slender frame. Her eyes were possibly the most striking of all, not for the flecks of gold that practically swam through her large irises, but for the profound look of sorrow that made her realise that Riyoul was infuriatingly correct. If there was ever a woman nursing heartbreak, then this was her. 

The bard looked down at her own more modest bust, took off her thick winter coat and adjusted the buttons on her bodice to ensure that more than just a hint of skin was on display as she approached the mysterious mageling. Eliza may never have had her heart in it, but with an effective charisma score of 129 there were few people who could resist her when she put her mind to it, Creation twisting things just enough to ensure that people noticed her no matter what she did. 

Eliza allowed herself a confident smile as she mentally prepared herself for the coming seduction. She knew from experience that mages were a bookish lot, too busy with the theory of spellcraft to develop the social skills they needed to thrive in wider society, and, looking as she did, Typh had to be pretty dysfunctional for her warrior to have already left her. 

The bard pushed a trickle of stamina into her skills as she advanced on the mage, all sets of eyes in the room but one following her sultry movements as she quietly stalked from the door up to the bar. 

Eliza almost pitied the woman; drunk and on the rebound Typh wouldn’t know what hit her.

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