It’s sort of like you would imagine it: dark, damp, a chorus of the damned screaming for mercy. And there I was in the middle of it, at a job interview. The necromancer needed a bodyguard or something. You know the sort of job, a big zombie to stand between him and whatever band of adventurers happened into his lair. Really, I just needed the experience, so I didn’t actually read the fine print. I think that’s how the misunderstanding got started.
Anyway, it was your standard interview: we were asked to choose a weapon and then sent into a battle royal of sorts. There were only five of us, which I thought was strange. The pay was good, and any job that takes you above ground is considered something of the cream of the crop to us in limbo. But not this job. Nobody but nobodies were in the arena.
I crushed them. That’s not really something to boast about. Seriously, my biggest competitor was an asthmatic skeleton with a peg leg. So, there I was thinking that the job was mine, that I might have some free time to haunt something for myself between shifts, that if I played my cards right the necromancer might let me go full time. Everything was looking great.
Then I figured out what the job was. You see, the necromancer had a daughter, and she was going through that rebellious stage, the whole stereotypical mess. It started with her getting curious about light magic, and then experimenting with healing spells, even questioning the absolute authority of the Dark Lord. Well, things came to a head when she decided to join a quest, and get this, donate all her loot to Halflings in Need.
And I was going along for the ride as her bodyguard. Technically there was no rule against my joining the quest. Believe me, I checked. My union said there was nothing they could do, and since the party was in need of a fifth member they overlooked my whole being a member of the undead issue. Not a single one of these idiot do-gooders, Cissel being a chief of self-righteous lunacy, seemed to have enough forbearance to have even considered what a quest like this would entail.
Let me tell you about them. There was Dixon and Rickson, dwarves. Imagine the coarsest seediest bar in the world, and then imagine the type of patrons in there. Now you’ve got it. They were doing community service after collapsing a few mines. When I first saw them they were wrapped in tight leather jackets grumbling at a corrections officer. They appeared to be decretive lawn gnomes stylized like a pair of bikers.
Then there was Cissel, and what I’m pretty sure caused this mess, Benedict the Lancer of Caverlot, or as Cissel incessantly referred to him, Bene. “Oh, Bene,” she’d say. It made me sick to my stomach, and that had rotted away into mulch two years ago. ‘Bene’ was artfully chosen by Cissel to be the exact kind of boyfriend that would give her father a hernia. Why do women fall for good-boys? Something about the shining armor, I think.
Tale Told 