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A Seafaring SagaChapter 27: Little Chipping
It is strange how the world works. It is strange how some things come together, and others fall apart. It is strange that while two persons can wander all Dametreos for a lifetime searching for one another and never meet, persons who had never known of one another before (or had no desire to meet) happen to run into each other one day. Is it the whim of the fates, or of the gods? Is it magic? Or is it horrible (or terrific, depending on the situation) luck? Whatever it is, whatever commands the ways of the universe, this day, many persons, all with a part to play, would end up in one Western Knight’s Kingdom town, to duke it out and ultimately change the lives (or even end them) of all involved.
Little Chipping was a small but respectable town planted on the fertile coastline of the Western Knight’s Kingdom territory on Kingdom isle. It was mostly a farming community. Many of the residents didn’t even live in the cluster of shingled buildings that bore the label Little Chipping. Instead, they lived out in the fields, in cozy little farm houses with adjacent red barns and a small dirty-white silos. Those who lived in the town itself consisted of innkeepers, bakers, and cobblers, and little old ladies with knitting needles and knit caps who sat about all day trading gossip. And interesting fact about Little Chipping was that it had the highest ratio of inns to residents in all of Kingdom Isle. There were a total of six inns crammed into the tiny towns square. During the winter months most of them closed down, but during harvest time, they were always full up with farmers, ranchers and fieldworkers thirsty for a good brew.
There was also a jailhouse, consisting of a single cell. Outside this jailhouse was Constable Craddek, a fat, amiable, good-hearted soul who probably hadn’t raised his baton to keep the peace in years. Little Chipping was a quiet, sleepy peaceful town, with a crime rate that would make larger, more well-known towns insanely jealous. Well, the residents of Little Chipping were about to get the surprise of a lifetime, that would fuel gossip for generations to come.
It all started when two foreign-looking persons entered the local inn, the Blue Geranium. Constable Craddek thought them an odd-looking couple. The man was rough-looking, and broad. He had a mane of burnt orange hair that matched his beard in color and unkemptness. A cutlass that Craddek was sure came from pirate origins swung at the man’s side. The man was dress similar to a Crusader, but Craddek had a feeling in his rather large gut that the man wasn’t a Crusader.
The woman was just a strange, if not stranger. She was also firmly built,show girls not tall, not short, nor very thin nor chunky. Her hair was blackest of black, and hung down limp and straight to her shoulders. She was dressed in a dirty, stained garb that had perhaps been a shade of blue when new.
With a glance left and right, as if scanning the town square for enemies, the couple entered the inn. Constable Craddek sighed. He’d better check them out. Never knew what form trouble came in.
Trouble came in another form a few minutes after the Constable Craddek had followed the suspicious-looking man and woman into the Blue Geranium. If Craddek had stay just a few minutes longer, he would have certainly forgotten the pair and followed after this brute instead, for if the man and woman looked like trouble, this new person looked, sounded and smelled like trouble.
“I’ve gotta get me rock…” muttered the man, clawing at his grungy hair as if scratching for flees, “Tyco Burtrand…”
The brutish-looking man stumped his way into an inn, not the Blue Geranium, but another, called the Tipsy Toad.
A few minutes later, another odd pair limped into Little Chipping, and the old ladies with their needles all agreed they were the oddest yet. A man with a battered tricorn hat, navy-blue seaman’s jacket and bushy black beard was carried a young lass, looking no older than fourteen, in his arms. The old maids and widows tutted.
“How awful it is these day, young girls marrying rich old men three times their ages. What has Dametreos come to? Back in my day…”
The man and his ‘bride’ crossed the town square and enter another inn, called the Plowman’s Brew. After about a span of ten minutes, Little Chipping was invading by strangers again, a lot of them. Like their predecessors, they were an odd bunch. Some them look quite trim, seamen officers looking very much like Crusaders. Others were simple seamen, still well-kept and disciplined. But others were a different type altogether. The looked like pirates through at through. There was one with a peg leg, another with a hollow socket for an eye and no teeth. Yes, tutted the old ladies, those were pirates indeed. This motley rabble grumbled and mumbled their way to a forth inn, the largest, called simply the Waterhole.
Not thirty seconds after the last pirate squeezed into the Waterhole did a final group enter Little Chipping. Now this group, the old ladies saw with approval, were not pirates or other bothersome crooks. These men were marines, Crusader marines at that. With a professional air, they marched their way to the final inn, called the Pickle Barrel.
There. The pieces were set. It sounds like a farce, I know, but I only tell it how it is. And this is how it happened. Five groups in Five inns in one small town. Each group has a part to play. And the game is about to begin.
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