First Draft...

[chibi_trillian]

Huh.  I think I may be on to something, Watson.

More specifically, I think I may have managed to actually come up with a plot and characters that I'll write more than just a series of short stories about.  Poor Suvo....stuck with Naderu in my head.  A girly-looking bandit and a flamboyantly incompetent elementalist--the two mix poorly.  Unfortunately for Suvo the Girly Bandit, I'm God, so I can get away with calling him girly AND with forcing him to spend time with Naderu.  Suvo can't decide whether to kill Naderu or himself.

 

Suvo was full of despair.  Despair, and beer.  But mostly despair.

He took a swig off of his recently refilled mug, and took stock of his current situation.  He, Suvo, bandit, thief, occasional murderer, and all-around not-nice guy, was broke, horseless, loveless, and starting to question the purpose of his life. 

Suvo’s monetary difficulties were a direct result of the opening of the new trade-road to the east four months ago, ironically because the Great Trade Road was plagued by bandits up and down its mighty length.  He’d been the bandit-kinglet of this section of the Road for close to five years.  No caravan could pass his territory unmolested, no matter how many guards they posted or how fast they tried to get through.  He’d even raided the King once, and had ridden off with a fat sack of royal loot.  He’d had to lay low for a year afterwards, but the reputation the act had earned him was well worth it. 

Now…now, he was selling his possessions to pay his bar tab.  He had five slightly dull coppers to his name, and those were going to pay for his beer tonight.

He’d had to sell his horse Bucephalon, faithful steed and partner in crime, earlier this month.  Frankly, he couldn’t afford to keep him fed and sheltered anymore.  Hell, he couldn’t afford to keep himself fed and sheltered anymore, much less his horse.  No Bucephalon meant that what few possibilities for banditry that still existed were now completely out of his reach.

His girlfriend of a year and half, Konuni, had left him three days ago for some over-muscled hero type.  She had told him she was tired of the life they’d been living, that she wanted to follow the path of good.  In Suvo’s cynical estimation, that meant that she’d gotten tired of waiting for the banditry trade to pick up again and left him for someone with more money and a steadier income.  The woman had expensive tastes, and a small-time bandit in a dwindling territory couldn’t support them.

Actually, Suvo had expensive tastes too and freely admitted it.  But he, unlike Konuni, could choose when and where to exercise them.  It aggrieved him greatly that he’d had to sell almost all of his jewelry and his nicer clothes.  His formerly large wardrobe was down to his current clothing:  one cotton shirt, dark blue, visibly mended; one leather vest, dark brown, extremely well-worn; one pair leather breeches, black, patched; one pair leather boots, black, in good repair—custom-made shoes sold poorly, especially when your feet were an odd size as Suvo’s were. 

Almost all of his jewelry was long gone.  But even in the lowest pits of his abject poverty, he’d refused to sell his favorite ring, the silver one with the blue goldstone on the top.  Some said it was ostentatious, others said it was girly, but fiddling with it on his finger usually kept him from punching people he couldn’t afford to punch, and when he did punch people it usually left a nice dent in their faces.  He might have long black hair that a maiden would envy, a slim figure to match, and big blue eyes that were marvelous for feigning innocence and trustworthiness and good for little else, but no one got away with calling Suvo the Bandit girly. 

There was an important reason for that rule: even with the scruffy beard he carefully cultivated, he still got mistaken for a maid half the time.  Banditry was hard work when you didn’t look like a proper bandit.  Suvo usually had to actually hurt someone to get their money and goods out of them, and most of them weren’t worth getting his sword dirty over.  At least he still had his sword, even though he could have gotten more for it than he did for Bucephalon.  He gripped the hilt, half to reassure himself, half to ward off the drunk who was wandering over to hit on him.  A man couldn’t be a man without his sword.

And then the door flew open, and his silent affirmation proved itself true.  Framed in the door, posing flamboyantly, one hand buried artistically in his frizzy blonde hair, was that nothing of an elementalist, Naderu.  Naderu’s spells only worked about a quarter of the time and usually brutally backfired the other three-quarters of the time.  One time he’d managed to destroy an entire village singlehandedly while trying to get a water imp out of the communal well.  They were still rebuilding, last Suvo had heard.

The man himself was so obnoxious that people would gladly travel the extra distance to go see a competent elementalist to get their fields properly rained on or their local forest spirits appeased.  He always wore robes in blinding colors that did not occur anywhere in nature to the best of Suvo’s knowledge, and he bounced around like a rubber ball with veils.  Lots of veils.  Apparently, he was under the delusion that they made him look “mysterious.”  In Suvo’s humble opinion, they made him look like the world’s ugliest Kivellan dancing girl.

“I have come in response to a call!” Naderu proclaimed, long hands fluttering like twittery little birds with no idea where to go on the end of his arms as he flailed dramatically.  He snapped out one arm in what was probably supposed to look like a purposeful gesture and came off looking like a mild convulsion.  Suvo was amused…until he realized the finger at the end of the arm was pointing at him.

“I have come to release you from your troubles, my poverty-stricken sister!” he shouted, other hand starting to form sigils.  Suvo’s eyes widened, half with rage, half with fear.  He shook his head frantically and reached for his sword.

And then the half-formed spell exploded in Suvo’s general direction.

Suvo’s last conscious thought before he flew over the bar and into the burly bartender was No, today is not a good day to be me…