A Million Little Pieces of Oblivion

by Raekwon Kenobi

Last thing I remember, I was in the Grub and Grog. Next thing I know, I wake up in jail – grubby and groggy. Too much Skooma, I assume. After a little while, some old coot with Alzheimer’s shows me a way to break out of my cell – insisting I call him "The Emperor." He does have a certain hobo wisdom, like he should be commanding a space-faring galleon, or heading an academy for orphans with strange abilities.



Somehow he loses me in the sewers while I’m vomiting off the night before, and I spend the next half-hour wandering the tunnels, fighting off sewer rats. My kind of life brings more rat meat than mutton, so I feel better after a meal. When I find him again, he starts nattering about some long-lost bastard son, the family consigliere, and how I've got to deliver this priceless heirloom. Then his ravings become incoherent. Mysteriously, he keels over dead (maybe it was ninjas).

I finally reach the exit, and my clothes are, uh... soiled. Luckily, a clothing store is right across the river, although it must be a fancy lad place. The clerks all try to give me the bum’s rush, so I end up killing a few – I need to find a manager.



Well, turns out they were bandits. The kind who hear rumors of monsters and disappearing comrades, and decide to write in their diary how the place will make a wonderful waylay station. I can’t resist a mystery. Whenever Dickwolf the Bard starts in on his Tales of Justice Constabulary, I can never leave until they're solved...

True enough, the place is lousy with zombies and skeletons, which I methodically dispose of. I sneak up some stairs and spy a hooded figure in dark robes, surrounded by corpses and reliquaries. “Who’s there?” he asks pleasantly, so I shot him through the neck with an arrow. I think it was the right thing - based on the grave-robbing and corpse-animating described in his letter to “Aluc.” But he had some pretty sweet threads.



On my way back to town, I stumble across a strange sort of weed – it’s probably worth some money to the right type of dealer.
I need to find one, and a bar.