Charlie

Thanks again for the positive feedback. I'm slowly working on it bit by bit. This section is again mostly background and building blocks. I promise more traditional action and rowdy Malifaux goodness with the next chapter. Lynch Mob: Chapter 3 Two days had passed since my confrontation with Lynch over the campfire. I met his accusation that I was able to use his aberrant soul siphon with complete denial. I didn’t know what he was talking about. I didn’t even know what it was, let along how to use it. He hadn’t believed me, to his credit. He argued that he knew I could use it or I wouldn’t have reacted the way I did when he revealed it. True. He argued that he had information from his Guild contacts that I was a retired Collector, also true. He knew that I had parted ways with the Guild on what he called ‘bad terms’. That wasn’t the half of it. I wondered if he knew just how true that was as well. I think of ‘bad terms’ as refusing to shake hands with a man after you think he cheated you at cards. I left a trail of bodies a blind man could follow in the dark. Hell, the Guild media outlets claimed the town of Harford Hills up north got hit by a tornado to explain all the damage. ‘Bad terms’ is probably what me and God will be on if we ever meet, doubtful as that is. I had been one of the chosen few trusted enough by the Guild to travel the country with both a siphon and soulstones enough for any wizard to level a small city. Traveling day after day through the epicenters of the dead and dying across the nation, trying to snatch up every stray ounce of magical energy within mile after mile of city and roadway. I spent my days filling stone after stone with the energy of the dead, and every night nursing the nightmares their voices brought me in the process. Using a siphon isn’t an easy thing on a man. There’s a bond between the siphon and the soul energy around it, and when you feed your energy into the siphon to power it, you become part of that bond. You feel the energy around you, inside you, a part of you. You feel that energy touch your mind, and it leaves no doubt of where it’s coming from, who it’s coming from. You feel like two, or three, or a dozen people all mingled into one mind. It swarms you, overwhelms you, leaving you wondering who you are and what you’re doing. You learn quickly that the siphon isn’t some subtle tool of magical art, but a blunt instrument of the worst kind of magic. The siphon uses your soul to pull and tug all those other souls around you like a magnet, forcing them into one place, where they have no option but to rage against the confines of your single consciousness. That’s when the soulstone saves you, or damns you. Like a hungry monster, the stone is there to pull the foreign energy off of you, and into itself. It feeds, savagely, ripping and tearing that energy into pieces that disappear into it as surely as water flows down a drain. In the end, you remain. Maybe there’s something more to you, or something less. You always remember fragments of memories, like broken dreams, taken from the spirits moving through you, but maybe you forget something that was once a part of you too. Either way, you never envy the fate of those you Collect, and you fear every day that you will join them eventually, when your body dies, or your will fails to cling to the part of you that makes you yourself when the soulstone starts to reap its harvest. So when Lynch accused me of being exactly what I was, I answered, “No,” and I kept answering, “no,” until he drew his revolver in a fit of frustrated rage and pointed the barrel right between my eyes. “Run out of enemies already, Isaac?” Pop had asked, without so much as raising his head to look at us. “Time enough for killing friends later, Isaac. Plenty of enemies left still, I recon. Let it lie.” That was all it took. A few words from Pops and Lynch grunted in what I assumed was amusement or agreement, and lowered his weapon. We hadn’t spoken for the two days since then. Clay had recovered quickly, or at least I thought he had. The next morning there was no outward sign that the mostly-dead looking man was any more dead looking than he had been before our ambush in the canyon. We were on our way out of the badlands, heading generally towards where I knew the railroad picked up for transporting cattle or silver back East. I knew the town of Eastridge was in the general direction, maybe another day or two away, but I had a feeling Lynch and I would have to resolve our problems by the time we got there, one way or another. I knew I couldn’t stay with them, and they couldn’t let me leave. That night when we made camp, I decided it was time to load my gun. I had moved away from the camp, taking my writing bag with me to work on my article. I stayed in sight to try and not draw any attention, claiming I didn’t want to waste the last daylight and be stuck writing by candle or firelight most of the evening. I had set my notebook and ink out on a flat rock, and was rummaging through my bag as if I was looking for a pen. From behind me I heard the sound of someone scuffing their feet on the ground, moving towards me. I pushed my peacemaker deeper into the carpetbag and looked over my shoulder to see my guest. “Didn’t want you to think I was spying on your….writing,” Pops said casually. “Mind if I steal the flat one from your paper there? My butt doesn’t take kindly to rough rock anymore.” “Sure,” I answered, moving my notebook and the jar of ink back into the bag at my feet. “If you’re planning to part ways with us at Eastridge, you’ll probably be wanting to get my story down before you go. You said that was part of what you were looking for, right? Why we’re all out here, killing and pillaging and what not.” “I thought Isaac made that pretty clear,” I replied. “I assumed he was speaking for all of you. Close the Breech, Destroy the Guild, and all the rest.” Pops smiled, his leathery face stretching around his widening mouth. “Isaac likes to talk a big talk. He could never resist it; coming up with some high muckity muck reason for doing what he does. Fact is, Isaac wants revenge, and killin’ is all he’s ever been any good at, so he figures if he dresses up mass murder like something noble, and still gets his revenge in the process, all the better.” “Revenge for what?” “That, paper man, is a question for Isaac. Right now we’re gonna talk about me, and maybe you,” Pop’s answered, poking his bony index finger first at his own chest, and then at mine. “I was like Isaac once myself. Hell, I probably made him into whatever he is now. I was his commanding officer back in the day. He was just entering the service, and we rode around collecting government medals for killing people with no understanding of why they had to die. Somewhere in there I finally smartened up, found a good woman, and settled down. Got myself stricken from the records on the way out of the service for what I did in between, but that’s another story. “Isaac, he never changed much over the years. Kept killing who they told him to kill. Eventually he made his way back to visit me and my kin. Must have run out of bullets, or enemies, or both. I suppose it was karma when he fell in love with my Annabelle. She never did have much sense, but I was already on the back end of old, and who was I to stand in the way of my daughter, God damn her taste in men.” My eyebrows shot up at the curse, and Pop’s noticed. I had always assumed he and Lynch were on the same page. It wouldn’t have surprised me to learn they were kin, but I never expected the animosity to come with it. I was about to ask a question when Pops cut me off. “Just wait, Mr. Brown, let me show you the real kicker. It’s easier that way.” Pops reached inside the pocket of his shirt, over his heart, and pulled out a tarnished gold pocket watch. “It itches like the dickens, but I want it close to my heart. Feels right that way,” he said, flipping open the watch and holding it towards me. Inside, opposite the watch face, was the faded image of a younger version of Pops standing next to a dark skinned, native woman. In front of the couple were two children, a boy and girl, dark skinned like their mother but with their father’s anglo features. “Beautiful family,” I said, my insides straining to stop myself from bursting out with questions. How could Pops have married a native? How could she love him knowing what he did for a living in the wars against her own people? How could the same thing have happened to Lynch…with Pops’ own daughter? “Bullshit,” Pops replied, though he was smiling. “You never run out of it, do you, Mr. Brown. This right here,” he raised his hand holding the watch. “This was everything I wanted in life, and disaster waiting to happen. I lost them all. Dead before they ever had a chance to live. Dead because men like me and Isaac still run this world. Dead because of the Guild I helped build. I watched my world burn to ashes around me, and I’ll be damned if I don’t do everything I can to bring the world the same in return.” Hearing him say it, I knew what Pops wanted. I could see the common thread he shared with Lynch. They were both looking for revenge for the same thing, and both consumed by their own guilt and responsibility for what had happened to their family. They wanted me to be like them. They knew what had driven me to destroy Harford Hills, and thought it would make me a kindred spirit. Maybe they would have been right once, but whatever part of me had felt the way they did was crushed under the weight of all the pain and suffering I had felt that rage cause. It was one thing to kill people you thought deserved to die. It was an entirely different thing to rip the life out of hundreds of men, women, and children, blaming them for your suffering, and then feel the anguish of their souls in your own mind before you damned them to a fate worse than death, knowing they never deserved it after all. There was a very good reason Collectors never killed people directly to harvest for soulstones. To kill a man with a siphon running didn’t just mean taking his life, it meant experiencing his death. I had been on my way to Harford Hills when I learned about my sister dying in a train crash coming to visit me. I was siphoning in Harford Hills when my Guild contacts told me the accident had been staged by another Collector on a special mission from the Guild leadership. I had taken my rage out on the town, and never been the same since. The magic I unleashed was too powerful to control, and I couldn’t shut down the siphon. It was like being my own torturer. Feeling hundreds of deaths but never dying. It took me months to recover. The Guild would have eliminated me if my friends hadn’t hidden me away. I had spent months looking for the Collector who killed my sister, but all I was ever able to determine was that he was on a mission to charge an immensely powerful stone. I was never even able to identify the stone. “I’m sorry Pops,” I finally said. “I don’t have the kind of fight you need in me anymore.” A choking laugh emerged from behind us. I stood and turned to find Clay Blackwind, his shadow stretching at an unnatural angle towards the fading sunlight, as if it were challenging the day to move it. Pops rose slowly, dusting off his pants and stretching his back with an audible crack. “I seen your spirit, broken soldier boy,” Clay hissed through his mutilated lips. “Plenty of badness still in you. Just give it the right food, and it will come out and play again.” “You’re wrong, savage,” I spat back at him. “Am I?” He laughed again. “Your sister, her name Jessica. The man who stole her soul, his name Atticus. The stone her soul trapped in, that called the Unmaker’s Hand. All three, the lady, the man, and the Hand. All three in Malifaux now.” “How could you possibly know that?” I stammered. “Because the Hand is mine, and I want it back!” He snarled, clenching his mummified claw into a fist before my face. An eerie green light began to emanate from his between his fingers. With a flick, he unclenched his fist, and the light shot into my eyes like a blazing torch.

Okay, so I finally got some free time to work on this plot line! This Chapter will be much shorter and more readable on this type of forum. However, it's mostly dialogue and not action driven, which isn't so hot for this type of media, but I feel it needs to get done. I'd probably have waited and posted it with more material that would involve bullets, explosions and such, but I don't want to take so long between posts, so I wanted to put this out there. Thanks and enjoy, Charlie CHAPTER 2 I stared across the campfire at the object in Isaac Lynch’s hand, recognized it instantly, and willed it to be anything other than what I knew it was. It wasn’t much to look at, just a simple metal ring about the diameter of a man’s head, like you might find in any brewery to band a small keg or cask. Less than an inch wide, from a distance it looked flawed, like the ring had twist along the edge at a single point to make it useless. I knew on closer inspection it would look more complex, like many smaller bands pressed together in some rainbow of metal alchemy, blending into something just on the verge of being beautiful, but somehow not. That ‘not beauty’ pulled the eye away from it, but I had been trained to ignore that, and much more. “Do you know what this is?” he asked. “A blind blacksmith’s rendition of a horseshoe?” I quipped back, knowing that my reaction had already said too much. I tried to loosen the grip my hands seemed to have on my legs, but knew that if I did the shaking would give away even more. Lynch let out a gruff laugh and spun the ring around his wrist. A playful gesture that I responded to by flinching against my will. Lynch ignored my reaction and started to speak. I took advantage of his monologue to collect myself, which was probably his plan all along since it was clear to him I was close to cracking. “This, Mr. Brown, is a tragic piece of magical craftsmanship that I only wish we could blame on the denizens of Malifaux, but it’s origins are sadly entirely within our own world. It started as one of the earlier projects of our sorcerers to staunch the failing flow of magical energy by consolidating as much free power as they could through the use of devices that would focus and collect energy over a vast area.” “I can’t really say how they worked, I don’t have an ounce of arcane blood in me after all, but the layman’s explanation is that larger rings designed like this one here could draw magical energy from miles around, like a lightning rod in a storm. They helped for a time, but ultimately the magic still continued to fail, and we set off down the path that led us to the Breech and Malifaux.” Lynch’s lip curled in a sneer when he said the name, like the city itself was to blame for all the collective wrongs Lynch saw in the world. “With Malifaux came soulstones, and the need to fuel those soulstones. But there’s only so much death to go around in the world. I mean, wizards can only start so many wars just to secretly fuel their magic off the carnage after all. But you would know more about that than I would, eh Mr. Brown.” Lynch gave me a long, hard stare across the fire, and for a few moments we held each others gaze. Where was he getting this information? Had I been set up? Things were drifting out of control too quickly for me to maneuver. I said nothing and looked away first, maybe from guilt at Lynch’s accusation, maybe just to get him looking somewhere else again so I could start to free my firearm from its hiding place in the folds of my coat….maybe both. Either way, Lynch turned his eyes back on the metal band in his hand. “So now it isn’t magical energy that needs to be drawn to focus points for the Guild and its masters to collect, but souls. Souls collected from battlefields, hospitals, prisons, and mines. Souls collected discretely, across whole cities full of people, so as not to alarm the public and cause an outcry.” “If I could find the man who figured out how to blend Malifaux’s soulstones and magic into this…thing,” he raised the metal ring like he wanted to hurl it into the fire, but stopped himself suddenly as his hand flung down and forward towards the flames. “But no. No, sometimes they make a mistake. This, Mr. Brown,” he used his free hand to flourish his fingers like a magician at the metal ring. “This, is not what you think it is.” “I already told you, I think it’s a horseshoe,” I said acidly, trying to hide my curiosity. Lynch smiled. One of those barbarian smiles, with white teeth glimmering in the firelight through his thick beard. “No, Mr. Brown. What you think is that this is a soul siphon. A device that in the proper hands could be used to suck the last, lingering essence of every dying creature within sight of us into one place, right at the heart of this circle of vile, infected, copper, steel, and God knows what else. Right here, where a waiting empty soulstone could suck it all up like a thirsty beggar. “ “But how much more deadly would it be in the hands of a Resurrectionist,” Lynch continued, his eyebrows climbing up his forehead in mock surprise. I was getting tired of the cat and mouse chatter. Lynch obviously knew, or thought he knew, who I was, and it was time he learned he wasn’t playing with a child. “Your off track Lynch. You’d make a horrible newspaper man. You told me that thing was going to destroy the Breech, end the Guild. So it harvests souls, so what? You said yourself, you can’t even use it. Even if you could, it wouldn’t be a threat to the Guild.” “Ah,” Lynch interrupted with a raised, professorial finger. “But this siphon is flawed, Mr. Brown. It doesn’t draw souls to it. It pushes souls away from it. In fact, it works so well, it unleashes the energy out of every soulstone near it. Poof! Gone! Like the wind, off to wherever you think that energy goes to when it isn’t burned up by some wizard’s magic. Just dead rocks, powerless constructs, empty husks of magical might.” He leaned forward towards the flames, his gaze burning with fanatic fervor. “Now tell me, Mr. Brown. What do you think a man with the proper motivation could do to the Guild, the Breech, Malifaux, and all its lovely, rotten, corrupt soulstone with a device like this?” Destruction. Chaos. Madness. Economic collapse. War. All thoughts flittering through my brain as Lynch flipped over what he thought was a pair of pocket aces in a game of cards. “Nothing,” I whispered. “You can do nothing with it, Mr. Lynch, because you have no idea how to use it.” Lynch slumped back away from the fire. “You’re right Brown, I don’t,” he shrugged. “But you do.”

Thanks for the positive feedback guys. I haven't forgotten this writing, but a started working on a follow up piece that I scrapped for being too generic. I've finally outlined a story that I think has some room to run, so I'm hoping to get rolling again; time providing. Maybe I'll get stuck on another airplane! Charlie

So, I'm on an airplane, and I don't want to read, and I don't want to watch movies. But, I've got a laptop, some time to kill, and a fair amount of Malifaux on the brain. This is an introduction to a set of characters I generated for the Malifaux setting. The plot is fairly complex, but time allowing, I hope to keep writing about it. Feedback is welcome and appreciated, and I suppose I could email copies to anyone that doesn't want to read 3-4000 words at a time in a forum window. This is a rough cut. Normally I would edit at least 2-3 times before putting something out to an audience, but it is what it is, in this case. Please enjoy, and thanks for reading, Charlie LYNCH MOB:CHAPTER 1 Hiding in the shadows above a redrock cliff, staring down the sheer face at a convoy of gunmen emerging from a sickly green hole in the air, it was easy to second guess my decision to seek out Isaac Lynch and his so called ‘gang’ of outlaws. “There have got to be twenty of them down there,” I whispered into the deeper shadows next to me. “Twenty-two, looks like to me,” the shadows whispered back in a deep voice that carried well, despite the rising volume of the column of men and pack animals below. “There are FOUR of us,” I answered, holding up the digits of my hand for emphasis, not even sure he could see them. With rumors and Guild officials claiming the ‘Lynch Mob’ numbering anywhere from a dozen to a hundred men, finding out you could cram the whole gang into a single army issue pup tent was just the first of many surprises I had encountered since tracking down Isaac Lynch. “Don’t flatter yourself Mr. Brown. There are three of US, and you. And unless you have some special newspaper man ability to write these guys out of existence I don’t know about. Now if you’ll please shut your mouth, I’d like to get on with this ambush.” I was about to throw out some witty reply, us ‘newspaper guys’ are full of those, but I got distracted as Lynch’s broad face and full beard were suddenly lit by the glow of a match that quickly become two, three, four flames as Lynch casually moved the lit match across the fuses of three bundles of wrapped dynamite. I could tell from his grin that my eyes were the size of saucers, but inside I was more concerned about our position being exposed to the caravan below than the threat of the dynamite going off in my face. Newspaper man wasn’t my first career after all, but Lynch didn’t know that. Moments later Lynch sent the three bundles of high explosives arcing through the air into the narrow canyon below. Part of me couldn’t help but compare their downward spiral to fireworks in flight, the light of the fuses bouncing back and forth between the canyon walls, casting ghostly shadows that would soon be replaced with hellish fire and chaos. Part of me wanted to watch what was about to happen, the part of me a didn’t like to remember existed, but just as I was leaning my head further out over the canyon, Lynch yanked me backwards away from the cliff. He may have saved my life. He certainly saved my hearing. Watching the dynamite explode in the canyon was like seeing a fissure to Hell open up before me, spitting fire, rock, and chunks of cooked flesh out like the mouth of some great, belching daemon. The screams of the dying blended with the sound of crushing rock smashing back and forth between the canyon walls. The jagged noise of exploding rock and stone was quickly overwhelmed by the wails and shouts of the wounded and dying below, interrupted by the occasional wild crack of gunfire from panicking caravan guards. Interspersed in the terrible symphony was the rhythmic, louder pang of a high caliber rifle. The Lynch Mob’s notorious gunman, Jared Jackson, or J.J., or Double J. The newspapers out West were found of attributing any unsolved rifle killing to him just because they could turn his name into so many varied monikers. The irony was that everyone who knew him just called him Pops. That was the only real truth to any of the rumors I had been able to see. Pops was old, as in grandfather old. He looked old, he acted old, he really was old. Yet any twenty-something soldier would gladly pay to have Pop’s eyes, his stone cold nerves, his complete apathy to violence. Pops had seen so much death during his life, it just didn’t matter to him anymore. It only took a few minutes for Pops to eliminate anyone in the canyon still healthy enough to pose a threat from a distance. There were still plenty of moans and groans though. The Lynch Mob almost always left survivors. They wanted the publicity, that was part of their goal. The real irony was, the papers would never tell the truth about what Lynch was trying to accomplish, and that’s why he hadn’t killed me when I found him. At least, not yet. “How did you know they would be here?” I asked Lynch as we made our way down a trail that led from the cliffs to the canyon below. “This has been a stable breech for months,” he answered. “Ever since the Guild realized some of the untracked soulstones coming out of Malifaux were being smuggled through these minor rifts, they been hunting them down with survey teams on both sides of the Breech. Lucky for them their scientists picked up pretty quick that whatever keeps our worlds apart is most thin near places like the Breech, where there was a focus of magical energy in both worlds. Well, magical energy or death, or maybe both, depending on whose philosophy you follow. Either way, the short of it is, you usually find rifts in nasty places full of magic and death, so they aren’t exactly the sort of place you just tend to wander into. You gotta go looking for them.” “That doesn’t exactly explain how you found this one,” I said. “I mean, there’s plenty of death here now that you’ve arrived, but it seemed pretty quiet before that.” “Gotta let me finish the story, Mr. Brown. You see, the Guild started sending teams out to look for these rifts. Found men with a talent for finding them, one way or another. Dowsers we call them, only they dowse for rifts, not water, or oil. Get it?” “So you’re a dowser, and you found this place for the Guild?” It wasn’t the question I wanted to ask, but I hoped it would lead Lynch down the right trail. I knew he worked for the Guild. Hell, I even knew about the teams. How the hell would I have found him in the first place if I hadn’t figured that part out. “Nope, I’m no dowser,” he shook his head. Clay though, Clay Blackwind may be the best dowser anyone’s ever seen. The best dowser, and a whole lot more, as you’ll soon see for yourself.” Speak of the devil….Clay Blackwind, the last member of Lynche’s little crew, appeared as if from nowhere further down the trail, just far enough ahead to be seen, but clearly showing no desire to walk with us. Even on alert, I couldn’t decide if we’d caught up with him, or he’d waited for us, or maybe he did just jump out of nowhere. I’d heard Clay described as ‘Lynche’s Devil Savage’, or ‘Redskinned Witchdoctor’, but at the end of the day neither or those really did him justice. You see, Clay Blackwind was a Native American from the Tahunta’asa tribe, a Southwestern tribe that anthropologists study because their savage pantheon includes many deities with representations that are almost identical to idols discovered in Malifaux. In fact, they are the only known culture in the world to have at least SIX gods all worshiped as some aspect of death, but even that isn’t why civilized folk call the Tahunta’asa the Daemons of the Desert. The Tahunta’asa worship death with a ritual passion, and their warriors and shaman engage in ritual scarification to honor death. Sometimes this means burning fingers, toes, or even whole limbs to the bone and preserving them through some strange techniques, leaving the person with black, dead flesh that somehow still functions despite the torture endured by the body. The shaman take the ritual even further, and the most honored among them could pass for a corpse in any graveyard. By that measure, Clay Blackwind had more honor that an English royal knight commander marrying a virgin princess who adopted orphans for her hobby. Clay Blackwind was the face of death in my nightmares. His scalp was hairless, burned and scarred, with bone showing in more than one place. His ears were gone, just holes in the side of his face. His lips were twisted and scarred, pulled up and in to look like the teeth of a skull. I honestly don’t know why he still has a nose. You’d think they’d chop that too, but it gave you something to focus on when he looked at you. He wore a sleeveless vest in the tradition of his tribe, leaving his entire arms bare. The left arm looked whole and undamaged, but the right was like mummified flesh, though I’d seen him scale a tree with it like it didn’t hurt a bit, and it held his weight just fine. Can’t say what the rest of his body looks like, and I don’t think I want to know. “I met Clay during the Indian Wars,” Lynch continued. “The Guild hired me because they wanted him, knew what he could do, some of it at least. We lead a team that looked for rifts in the Southwest. Wasn’t much work, to be honest. Seemed Clay already knew where most were, but they’ve been growing lately. Small rifts getting bigger, and new small ones popping up more and more.” Lynche paused, looking introspective. “Now we’re getting to the meat of the story though. So maybe I’ll just be quiet, and let you see what it’s all about instead of jabbering.” Lynche nodded, mostly to himself, and we walked down to the carnage in the canyon as the sun began to rise over the cliffs. It was beautiful. The sunrise….and the carnage. That’s just the kind of guy I am. That’s why I quite my old job. We made our way quickly through the debris left by the dynamite and Pops’ handiwork. Wood, flesh, living or dead, it was all debris. None of it could hurt us, and we just ignored it. We made our way to the center of the wreckage near the rift, meeting Pops on the way as he came down from the opposite cliff face. He smiled at me, and I gave him a wink. When we reached the rift it looked like a cloud of rippling green light, shifting and moving on invisible currents, but always pulling back in on itself. “I wonder why it showed up here,” I asked nobody in particular. “Only path for miles to take horses through the canyon lands,” Clay rasped, his voice both full of gravel and snake-like s’s from his distorted lips. “Many traveled through here during old wars. Many died, just like these,” he gestured at the bodies around him. “Ambush,” I said, getting the clue. “Still, must be something interesting on the other side too. These things area one way street.” Clay turned to look at me. I’d describe the look he gave me, but he’s only got one, and it’s Death. “This rift only opens on certain moons. My people held it sacred once, but no longer. Never again.” He said the last with passion, and his right hand drifted to caress the think wooden staff strapped across his back. His coup stick. Tribes used them as totems to serve as records of great deeds or feats in battle. Most used marks or notches, or beads and feathers. A strong warrior might have a foot length of marks or a dozen feathers on a stick. Clay’s blackened coup stick was notched so heavily is looked more carved than marked, and the Tahunta’asa used enemy teeth or finger bones as trophies. I could see something like polished stones decorating the length of the stick, but I never wanted to take a closer look. “That’s how we knew they’d be here,” Pops joined the discussion, filling the awkward silence. “This one only opens a few times a year. It’s a big one, and relatively safe on both sides of the rift. So they gotta use it when they get a chance.” “They being the smugglers?” I asked, thinking I had a chance to get Pops in a chatty mood. “They being the Guild,” Lynch said, closing behind me as I turned to look at him, and he presented me with a fist full of Guild identification badges taken from the nearby corpses. I’d say I was surprised, but nothing the Guild does really surprises me anymore. Never the less, the Guild control the Breech, they don’t need to smuggle things out of Malifaux, they just take it. It didn’t make any sense. I voiced my thoughts, and Lynch gave me a nod. “That, my newspaper man, is the first reason the price on my head is so high. I don’t know why they’re doing it yet either, but I know they’re doing it, and that’s enough to bring them down on me hard. That, and I know what they’re smuggling in the first place.” Lynche made a dramatic flourish with his hands and stepped to his right to reveal a battered metal chest lying on the ground behind him. The lock had either blown apart in the attack, or Lynche had opened it already. With another little dramatic footwork he kicked the lid back to reveal the contents. “Soulstones,” I said , part gasp and part question. Lots of soulstones, maybe dozens. “So, the Guild is smuggling soulstones out of Malifaux, even though they don’t need to, and you have been stealing them. They’d kill you, raise you, and kill you again just for this one shipment.” “Might be fun being a corpse for a while,” Pops laughed. Then Clay gave him a hard stare. Pops looked the shaman up and down with an appraising eye. “On second thought, based on what I see before me, maybe I’ll just stick to being old.” Lynch gestured towards Clay, and then to the box of soulstones. The Indian nodded once, picked up the chest of soulstones, and started moving towards the portal. I started paying attention to Clay, walking towards a gateway to nowhere with a fortune in rocks, when Lynch interrupted. “They may think we’re doing it for the stones, but we’re not thieves looking for a profit,” Lynche said, truth and challenge both in his eyes. I believed him. I’m good at judging people, and Lynch wasn’t the type to run murder for hire. It didn’t fit his character. “I don’t know why they’re doing it. It could be politics, or factions in the Guild. Lord knows they’ve got those to spare. They aren’t the only smugglers, and we don’t pick sides. You bring soulstones back from Malifaux, and we hit you. Who they are and why they run the rocks back doesn’t matter a lick to me. We take their lives, then we take their stones, they we do our business. Fact of the matter is, the only reason we’re still operating is that all the smugglers we’re pissing off can’t get along with each other long enough to deal with us.” “And what is your ‘business’?” I threw in the finger quotes, the really annoying kind, just to see if I could keep him all fired up and chatting. “Watch,” he ordered, pointing back towards the portal and Clay. During our chat the Indian had been busy around the portal. He had removed the soulstones from the Guild chest, and they know lay on the ground in a rough pattern I couldn’t quite make sense of, surrounding the portal, glowing softly. Clay backed away from the rift and drew his coup stick with his dead hand. He began to chant, slowly at first, moving the stick through the air in swooping patterns and loops. Gradually the pace of his chant quickened, as did his movement with the staff, and soon he was moving to an invisible rhythm around the circle of stones surrounding the rift. I watched silently, captivated by what I was seeing, what I was hearing. One by one Clay bent to the invisible rhythm, touching the tip of his coup stick to each stone around the rift. As he did, light sprang from the stone, pulled by the stick like thread from a ball of yarn. It moved with him, trialing him, building with each new stone he touched until a cloak of green incandescent strands floated behind him. His voice , too, was changed. Not one voice, but many voices. Growing and building with each movement of the staff, each touch of the stones. Soon there was no Clay at all, only a choir of voices, chanting together, moving, dancing around the rift in a web of light so beautiful it would make a spider weep. Then, suddenly, the rift was growing, expanding towards the web of light surrounding it. Or… no. It was the web growing, moving up and over, down and under, surrounding the rift, embracing it. The web of light grew brighter and brighter, the strands now merging with one another into a sheet of fluorescent green brilliance, engulfing the rift, squeezing it, crushing it. The voices no longer chanted or sung, but screamed and howled, their rage bent inward at the rift, pounding it like fists, smashing it down again and again. The rift was shrinking, maybe dying. Fear, rage, hate, vengeance. The emotions were palpable, like hammers on my mind. Pulling on me, feeding off me, inciting the part of me that lies buried under years of patience and strain to hold it at bay. I had to run. I knew I was losing my mind, that I was being pulled apart, or crushed to pieces, or whatever was happening to the rift was happening to me too. I focused all my will on turning, moving one foot, then the other, stumbling away from Clay Backwind’s web of souls. I closed my eyes, lowered my head, and ran. When I felt the sudden, overwhelming sensation of pain near the top of my skull, I had the brief fleeting thought that I should have run AWAY from the side of the canyon. When I woke, the rift was gone. The canyon was gone too, since my eyes told me clearly I was lying near a campfire, on a flat plain, and not surrounded by piles of exploded Guild guards, glowing balls of necrotic energy, and howling souls screaming for revenge. I tried to look around, and my eyes fell on another crumpled form. Judging by the fashionable skull peering through his scalp, I knew it was Clay. Lynch was sitting close by his sleeping companion, concern etched plainly on his face. “He closed the rift,” I rasped through a too dry throat. I thought it was a question when I said it, but I knew it was true before it left my mouth. Lynch turned his eyes to me and nodded slowly. “His people once worshiped them as Gods, but they’re not Gods. I don’t know what they are, even he doesn’t,” he gestured towards Clay. “But they can die, so we can kill them. The rifts have to be closed, or mankind will die. Maybe we won’t think we’re dead, but whatever we are now will be replaced by something darker, something that makes us just as good as dead. The soulstones are the key. The soulstones and the rifts. We have to close the rifts, and destroy the stones. It’s the only way to keep us safe.” I laughed, loud and wheezing, and coughing. Lynch glared at me, but I couldn’t stop myself. “Well, now I know why the price on your head is so high. You want to close the rifts, and destroy all the soulstones? Might as well say you want to destroy the Guild, and magic, and life as we know it.” “The bounty on my head isn’t high because I WANT to do it, it’s because I CAN do it,” he said with such sincerity, his eyes blazing brighter than the campfire, that I knew he not only meant it, but he believed it. “How?” I asked the question now hanging over the campfire, even looking to Pops, who sat stoically across the fire from me, picking at something I couldn’t see through the flames. “How can you possibly close the Breech?” “Because I have him,” Lynch pointed to Clay. “And I have this,” he said, reaching into the folds of his coat, then thrusting his hand out towards the fire so I could see what he was holding.

I live down near the 605/405 interchange. I'd like to generate some interest in the game, and can probably arrange a meet up at Brookhurst Hobbies or the War House, either to play or just let you take a look at some of the figs. Anyone is welcome to pm me if interested. Maybe with enough people organizing a small group we can get one of the stores to support a demo, and maybe carry stock. Charlie

Welcome, I'm also in SoCal, near Huntington Beach. Just moved back to CA myself, so not sure if there's anyone in the area who plays this yet, but I'm looking to find other players. Shoot me a pm if you want to try and get together or something. Charlie