@Device(PostScript) @Make(Report) @Style(Spacing 1.5, Leftmargin 0.75 inch, Rightmargin 0.75 inch, SingleSided, Font = TimesRoman, Size 10) @comment(Set these values appropriately for each character profile) @string(name="Dirk Brightwind ") @string(realname="Dirk Sundance Brightwind ") @string(playername="Player Name") @string(id="903487") @include (/mit/abstract/Characters/Sheets/cover.mss) @MajorHeading(@value(realname)) One of these days, you'll learn better than to trust @i(anything) to a woman! That bitch Charity says she hasn't seen the box Rebecca swears she left at the House of the Veil; one of them has to be lying, or they're in cahoots. As if you didn't have enough trouble without them! Rebecca Shellar is a Guard of the Realm you'd known quite well before the war, and continued to know quite well after the war had been declared, despite the fact that you were both soldiers. Rebecca, it turns out, was a traitor to her people -- somehow, the Realm seems to breed those. In this case, though, she turned out to be a useful traitor. You had found out through Naptuhim Nahor, a mage in the Realm's Wizard Conclave (what @i(is) it about these Westerners that makes them unable to remain loyal to anything?), that the Conclave had uncovered a series of treatments with which they could fashion extremely effective armor and weapons. At first, this didn't especially interest you -- after all, what's another shipment of weapons more or less? -- but when Nahor explained that they could tip the balance of the war towards the Realm's victory if they remained in the hands of the Guard, you took notice. Weapons @i(that) powerful were certainly worth trying to obtain, even if they were magical. You told Lance about the shipment (conveniently leaving out the bit about magic -- Lance is one of the traditionalists who really can't stand the thought of it ...), and then started contacting some people to get it into his hands. Of course, you couldn't use Nahor himself to get your hands on them; although he's most assuredly a traitor, he's also a coward, and claims his intent is to ensure that the war comes to an end with a minimum of bloodshed. So you contacted Rebecca, figuring that a Guard of the Realm would be best suited to the particular act of subterfuge you required. In exchange for promised title to a small piece of Brightwind territory, she agreed to intercept the shipment and deliver it to the Clanlands. Nahor provided a package, with magical devices and instructions, that you provided to Rebecca. The devices were designed to shrink and transmit packages over considerable distances (working with magic is distasteful, but you realize you have to fight fire with fire on occassion), in this case from Rebecca's hands to Lance's. If anything went wrong, you said, she should leave a message at the House of the Veil (where Charity would find it and relay it to you, though Rebecca didn't know that). Charity says she never laid eyes on it. Rebecca is nowhere to be found. Lance is breathing down your neck. You're ready to explode. Lance will probably understand, but he'll be annoyed; he was counting on that shipment to place the Fist of the Clans in a much stronger position within the Clans (as well as to play some political power games with Marshall Oasis Brightwind, your Clan Head and the leader of the Clan's martial forces. Lance and Marshall have a strange rivalry going, despite their similarities ... you work for both of them, secretly, but may Mishael protect you if @i(they) ever find out!). At first, you thought you'd be able to placate Lance when Marshall told you he was ill and wouldn't be arriving at the peace summit meeting, that he was giving you his vote in the Clasp regarding it. Instead, when you arrived at the Castle, Marshall was already here. Probably just another of his tricks; as long as you've known him, he's liked to test his people to keep them alert. Whatever the reason, though, it's landed you in hot soup. Lance keeps saying that if the Clasp will sanction the Left Hand because they provide the Clans with necessary firepower, then the Fist can damn well be treated the same way; he was counting on your plans to arrange that. You wonder what his reaction would be to finding out that you and Marshall have been working with one of the Left Hand (you take that back -- you @i[know] what his reaction would be!), on a plan that would end this whole war for good and all! Granted, it's a somewhat odd solution -- but then again, it's a desperate problem: Westerners on Clan Lands and their half-breed offspring. You, and the others who understand the need for the purification of the Lands and the People, realize that this intermingling will only serve to weaken the Human Beings, and bring them down to the level of the denizens of the Realm. The pollution has to stop, Westerners must be excluded once more from the Lands and the halfbreeds exterminated -- yet this will not be easy. In fact, if there's anything that the last few decades have proven, it's that isolation of the two races is damned near impossible. Thirty years ago the outsiders were discovered, which was the beginning of it all. Then, at least, there was the original Fist, a team of warriors who knew the glory of combat. You repelled the invaders from your land and they responded with a "peace treaty" promising to respect your rights in the future. Your fellow humans made one basic mistake, and that was trusting the Westerners to behave like humans. Indeed, there were those who argued that immigration and free trade across the should be allowed to go on unchecked and unobserved, although luckilly that idea was vetoed in favor of simple isolation. Even with that isolation, you heard stories of Clansmen and women who had been taken into the Realm, or had moved there of their own volition (the fools!), being abused by the Realm's own police force and legal structure, as if such a wretched hive of scum and villainy could even claim to have a legal structure ... even then, though, no action was taken by the Clasp. And so you, along with Lance, revived the spirit of the original Fist, running rescue missions across the border to free your fellow humans. In the meantime, you rose in status within your Clan and were eventually chosen to join the Iron Gauntlet. You've always felt a little strange about the Gauntlet -- while you are completely and unquestionably loyal to the Clans, many of your activities are technically illegal and vigilante by nature. In particular, your affiliation with the Purebloods would be seen as traitorous by many, for you and they are trafficking in magic. Still, you are and always have been a practical man and a practical soldier, and it's stupid to throw away a weapon your enemies are using against you. So while it is beyond doubt your duty to find and bring to justice those who would betray the Clans, you must be careful not to allow your fellow sworddancers to suspect your activities. You threw yourself into your work with the Fist, despite its illegality, but you came to realize that there were too many cases of Realm abuse for two men to arrive at a resolution -- and even when Cord Sweetwater and Mercy and Charity Goldenfield joined your cause, there were still too few of you and too many of them. And then came the final straw, for while you and your new Fist was trying to undo the remaining damage from the first war against the Westerners, the Clansman's Clasp chose to open the borders to the West and undo the efforts of decades. Lance fought it, of course, as did Mercy (who attended many of the Clasp meetings in place of the Lady Joy, although recently she has been deprived of that position by Joy's unusual interest in affairs political) -- though to your surprise, Marshall supported it. At the time, you had not yet really gotten to know your Clan Head, and certainly hadn't become affiliated with him and his Purebloods, and his support of the open border made you wonder just where his loyalties lay. Since then, you've realized he believes as strongly as you do in the purification of the Clanlands, although you still don't understand his motivations for voting as he did. In any case, your people were outnumbered, and the borders were opened. Lance successfully pushed for the establishment of the position of Senator Prime, a single voice to speak for the Clans with the Western King; unfortunately, somehow the West had established a rule by council much like the Clan's. Lance's "Primacy" turned into a sham, and the responsibility for keeping your people from being corrupted came back to the Fist, as the borderline between Clans and West became ever more ill-defined. And the solution appeared, finally, in the person of Dodani Yitzhok. Yitzhok was a Western smith of some kind, who sent a team of miners out in search of mythril, which it seems is a material of some value in the Realm. (In the Clanlands, of course, it is as common as any other semi-precious stone, and Clearstone Mountain is full of it.) You intercepted this team, and with a few pointed questions determined how they could be used to circumvent the cowardice of your fellow Clan Heads. Within several days, the team had begun mining the sides of Clearstone Mountain, near the Shrine of Mishael -- and that was all it took to trigger another war. Since then, you and the Fist have been keeping the war going for years. Sometimes this took more funds than you had available, however, and so Lance occasionally would dip into the Clasp's treasury for a loan -- and one day, he was caught by Mercy Goldenfield as she inspected the Clasp's books. Mercy turned out to share many of your goals and attitudes; she wanted to ensure that the boundaries between Realm and Clans remained closed and that the war went on. Just keeping the races to their separate lands is not going to happen by force of will or force of arms alone, however, especially as some of the Clan Heads are in favor of maintaining an open border and free trade with the Realm after the war! With people like that to contend with, it would be pointless to exterminate the polluted ones within the Clans, as they'd be promptly replaced by more halfbreeds and more invaders from the West. And it's already been established that a simple political division -- and even a war -- just isn't enough. It's for this reason that you agreed to support Krys Sweetwater's plan to use witchcraft to separate the Clans and the Realm, by getting one of the Devaic Lords to lift a wall of stone along the borderland. If you succeed, it will simultaneously cut the Realm off from the human race, and perhaps demonstrate to your fellow Clansmen the uncontrollable power of the forces they are trying to tamper with. Though you don't completely understand the nature of the forces in question, you understand that to accomplish your plan you must obtain both some sort of legal ownership of contiguous territories along the Western border (mostly Sweetwater and Goldenfield land) and some sort of legal ownership of Clearstone Mountain. The first will probably take some doing, but the second should be fairly simple if you do it right. No one can claim legal ownership of the Mountain unless he speaks for all the Clans. But while that is impossible for you, it isn't for Lance! After all, a devaic Lord certainly qualifies as an "outsider," and the way Krys has explained the nature of his Lord (that's still a distasteful concept, to indenture yourself to a creature from another World -- no matter @i(how) useful it may be), all he requires is a legal reason, even if it is a loophole. You've also made a little progress on the land-ownership front. Stratus Bluemist, a fellow Sworddancer who's been missing for more than half a year after disappearing during a battle, had somehow managed to obtain the land-chit that granted him the ownership of a rather large block of territory along the Western border. It isn't worth too much to anyone else, since the land is mostly deserted, but it's valuable to you -- and you got your hands on it after you pushed him into challenging you to a sworddance duel and wagering it. Now, even though it isn't @i(strictly) ownership of that land, you don't think you'll have to worry about convincing the Lord Kryssonyx... The sworddance. Annoyance sweeps across your features as you remember the Westerner you ran into, literally, when you arrived on this Castle. He'd introduced himself as the SwordDancer; you could @i(hear) the capital letters, though you'd never heard of him, and the unmitigated gall of the man stunned you completely. Imagine, a Westerner claiming the heritage of the Sworddancers! He must needs taste your blade in penance. Such an insult must be avenged. Which reminds you, also, that you have to perform your duty with the Iron Gauntlet here, since there are only you, your cousin Hawk Sundance (who's a bit strange to start with, though he's an amazing fighter), and now Stratus (who, it seems, somehow managed to escape the Realm). The Gauntlet takes orders from the Clansman's Clasp, and you are sworn to protect them - and while you're here, it may be the perfect time to find some of the thieves who have been plaguing Clearstone Castle. The Right Hand, it seems, has become rather cocky and arrogant, and the time has come to take them down a peg or two. However, that will be difficult with just the three of you, outnumbered as you are by the warriors of the enemy. And the conveniently "accidental" destruction of the teleport platforms that brought you here prevents you from summoning reinforcements. As if you couldn't see through such an obvious ploy. In any event, your biggest problem this week is likely to be convincing the Heads of Clans Goldenfield and Sweetwater to give over ownership of their border lands, and Lance to give over ownership of Clearstone Mountain. Put that way, of course, there's no way they'll do it ... and you certainly aren't going to tell them the @i(truth) of what you're up to. It's a challenge. On the other hand, you've always loved challenges. @i(You are Dirk Sundance of Clan Brightwind, one of the --- if not @b(the) --- finest warriors of your day. The abilities you have reflect this; you are fond of strategy games, like keeping your subordinates and peers on their toes, and tend to stick to causes no matter what. You are Aware, and have a Will of Iron; you have a Sense of Honor, when you think to listen to it; you can wear the heaviest armor with ease, and are skilled in most forms of combat, your preferred weapon being your longsword. (SwordSkill =+4, Sword Defense = +1, DaggerSkill= +2, Missle Weapon Skill =+1, Florentine= +2, Martial Arts = +2). You are knowegable in many fields, but the one you excell in is Warlore. You could talk about it for hours, if you ever thought to speak more than three sentences a day... These abilities may serve you well, and soon.... the sooner the farce of the "Peace Talks" is over, the better, but you have to let them break down naturally, not be prodded by you and the East. Your items are few, but necessary: your armor and sword, three daggers, a light crossbow, three shuriken, a few land-chits, some mythil coin, some pretty gems (you like them, you're not sure why), and your little black book (some of the women you don't actually know; Hawk refered them to you....) Patience, then, is the watchword... and you have much else to keep you occupied.... good luck!) @newpage @include (/mit/abstract/Guides/guide.clans.mss) @include (/mit/abstract/Guides/guide.brightwind.mss) @include (/mit/abstract/Guides/lore.creation.mss) @newpage @section (Organizations) @include (/mit/abstract/Organizations/fist.clans.mss) @include (/mit/abstract/Organizations/iron.gauntlet.mss) @include (/mit/abstract/Organizations/purebloods.mss)