Rebellion in the Silver City - Hell's Rebels for PF2 by DM Doctor Evil

Game Master DM DoctorEvil

Well, perhaps not a lie, but an untruth. “By this time tomorrow, you’ll have a little brother or sister.”

Or perhaps a half untruth. She saw part of it. Whether it was a brother or a sister was unclear.

At nine years, Impasha understood that a child forms in its mothers belly and grows there and eventually emerges, but the precise process of how that happened was unclear. It seemed to be some occult secret, the way people talked around it. So naturally she was curious when the expected day came, and waited outside the room where her mother was sequestered away with the midwife. But almost immediately, she could tell that people around her were worried. Hushed, intense conversations, carried out only once she’d been shooed away out of hearing range. Her mother groaned and whimpered and strained and yelled for hours, and eventually her father went away to close the inn and sit nursing a bottle alone in a corner, like a wolf at bay on a cliff’s edge, scared and furious. It went on like that all night, and Impasha sat outside the door with her arms around her knees, trying to understand and desperately worried. Toward morning her mother grew quieter, and periodically the midwife would appear with buckets filled with bloody rags, asking for more sheets to be brought and for fresh water to be drawn.

Her brothers wandered the building aimlessly, not wanting to leave but not wanting to be too close, and not wanting to get too close to their father, who was coiling himself tighter and tighter as that long night went on. She’d take the rags to the sink and wring them out and rinse them as clean as she could manage, then hang them to dry near the fire. That was one of her clearest memories, sitting in the kitchen, with dozens of wrinkled torn bits of linen, dripping and steaming in that hot room, smelling like panic. By the time dawn was fully broken, the rags were still coming out of that room, but they were only a pale pink now.

Her mother was kept out of view of course, but Impasha could hear her, no longer groaning and wailing, but now just gasping for breath and quietly moaning some sort of delirious incantations. The midwife sent word out to her oldest brother that they should bring a priest. That’s about when the part of the baby emerged in a washbasin— they’d covered it with a towel and took it down to her father for some reason. Perhaps they didn’t know what else to do with it. He listlessly told them to dump it in the midden then took himself off to one of the rooms to sleep. Impasha saw it from the top of the stairs. It looked like a leg with red ribbons attached. Her mother was dead before the priest arrived. They wrapped her body up in a sheet and a man carried her out over his shoulder like a sailor’s duffel bag. The sheet showed signs of dampness, and it seemed to Impasha that her mother was sweating, and even though she knew the poor woman was dead, she protested that her mother couldn’t breathe. And that was the only time she cried in the whole episode, when no one paid any attention to her irrational worry.

That was when she saw the bed. It was her job to clean the room after all. The mattress was a total loss of course, and was carried out to be burned, as were the blankets. They might perhaps have been soaked and scrubbed clean, but they were saturated with something worse than blood, and that was death, and that could never come out. She scrubbed the room for hours with a brush and a pail. She started on the floor, but soon discovered that the blood had sprayed everywhere. Droplets seemed to coat the room’s walls at all angles. There were even drops on the ceiling. She’d once seen a hog butchered in the back yard where it had broken free of its restraints while its neck sprayed out in all directions for several minutes, far longer than she’d imagined possible. It was like that. When she asked her brother what had happened, he said something about ‘breech’, and explained that the baby got stuck inside. She asked what was going to happen next, and he shook his head and said nothing.

When her father emerged later that day, he came straight to her, went on his knees and hugged her desperately. “Oh you poor little thing.” he moaned out to her. She didn’t realize it was prophecy.

Things never got much better after that day. Her mother had been the tentpole around which The Dog and Pony Inn had been supported, and now the tent collapsed on all of them. Her eldest brother got himself apprenticed to the Weavers Guild, only too eager to escape the debacle. Her father spent most of his time tending the bar, and often that tending involved drinking the stock, and her other brother Caleb, a lad of 13 years, was charged with looking after the horses. Impasha went to work doing everything her mother had done, the cooking, the cleaning, the washing, the shopping (when there was money to shop with). Of course she’d helped her mother with all these tasks, but she was woefully unprepared to handle it alone. None of the workers came to the inn for daily meals anymore, and not simply because Impasha was a novice cook. There was a grey, dismal pall about the place now, tragedy and anger lingered in the corners and behind the bar, and an unhealthy silence echoed about the common room. Lodgers were few and far between. The money quickly dried up. The roof began to leak and two of the rooms on the upper level became uninhabitable. And her father wouldn’t allow the room where her mother died to be used for any purpose.

Her father had become stuck in his grief, and his anger only deepened. People in the neighborhood whispered that he’d been too cheap to send for the priest when it could have done some good, and that her mother had been too old to have another child in the first place. People avoided him like he was an executioner, and warned strangers away from his darkened door and his flaking sign. A queer smell like vinegar and sweat and rotting seemed to seep from the wood, where mildew settled in through the faded paint. And he balled up his anger tighter and tighter, but he could never keep it inside for long. Three days after her mother had died, he backhanded Impasha across the back of her head so hard she fell down and cut her cheek on the side of a table. He couldn’t seem to forgive her for not being able to fill in fully for her mother, for vegetables boiled too long or meat undercooked or bread too tough on the teeth, for bowls insufficiently clean or linens with holes or spiderwebs in corners.

At night, as she and her brother tried to sleep in their bed, he would often call out to them, and they would look at one another, each silently pleading the other to go this time, hating him, hating each other, sinking deeper into the blankets as the bellows below grew more insistent. In another circumstance, if they’d been different people, it might have drawn them together into alliance, but instead they found that the lifeboat could not hold them both, and survival overwhelmed their filial bonds. Usually it was her who answered the summons, because she was the smaller and could be physically pushed out of bed by her brother, and she’d go to her father to wait upon him for some mundane thing, but mostly to sit and bear witness to the magma of his resentments bubbling out of him for hours on end, holding court to listen to the poison in his soul and to be impeached for all the paranoid betrayals of his miserable life. In these drunken monologues, he rarely touched her, but she almost prayed he would just hit her and give her an excuse to then slink away. It was dull and tedious and unpleasant and there was almost nothing she could say that could help. Agreeing with him brought scorn and derision, but disagreeing brought indignant rage, so usually she sat silently, as out of sight as she could get away with, refilling his glass or getting a new bottle or helping him to change his pants after he’d urinated on himself. Nothing was worse than cleaning and drying his cushioned chair at 2 in the morning, a long and inefficient process, knowing she also still had to wash and dry his pants and all before she rose to begin the breakfast at dawn, a few hours hence.

He seemed to hate her now, blaming her for not being her mother, for being unable to save him and unable to stand up to him. She hated him now too, and feared him, and dreamed of running away from him. But where could she go? She was a prisoner, condemned to a lifetime of servitude. Her child mind bubbled with self-pity and misery, but was unable to conceive of actually leaving. When she had a few silver in her hand and went shopping for vegetables or potatoes, the thought would come to her of simply not going home, of using those paltry coins to flee to… somewhere. But she didn’t know how to do it, how to actually survive away from him; beastly as he was, he was all she had. He had to be endured, like being caught in a storm walking on a lonely road.

After two years of this, Caleb compounded her misery. The loneliness of their lives, the lack of feeling between them, the overarching terror of their father — all of it could hardly fail to contort them as they struggled through their childhoods. And so the bed they shared gave birth to a new imp of torment. She would work later and later, preparing for the next morning and hoping to give Caleb time to fall asleep, then attempting to slip soundless and stealthy under the blanket and hope for weariness do its work to keep him from awareness. But all too often he was awake, and from behind her neck he would whisper her name and fondle her hair and pull her onto her back, and his face would be there, in the dark, too close, eyes a little crazed, a weird hard smile showing his teeth and a smell of excited perspiration as his hand would slip under her shift to pinch and pet her. Or he’d let her keep facing away, and she’d feel him pressing into her from behind, his nose snuffling her neck, a strong arm cradling about her and pressing her into him. Or he’d make her put her hand on his male organ and rub it, feeling it stiffen and grow uncannily in her little trembling hand. It all terrified her— she knew it was wrong, but he warned her how angry her father would be if he found out, and yet he also assured her that it was really nothing so terrible, that no one was hurt and that in fact it was just a bit of naughty fun. And in her darkest admissions, there was an element of pleasure in their lurid play, a sating of curiosity, and a rebellion against the tyranny of her wretched father — sometimes it felt good to befoul this bed with behavior that would make him choke in disgust. But that sliver of acquiescence was mostly overwhelmed with shame and disgust and loathing, and a conviction that she was a nasty dirty little girl who deserved the perdition she was tasked with.

The older she grew, the less patience her father had for her, and the less she was able to hold her tongue and submit. She obeyed her father, but she’d hold his gaze with mocking contempt before she did it. She’d sabotage him in small ways, and talk just loud enough to people in the street about the ruin of the family. She grew better at making his meals and serving them to him at his table as he expected, anticipating his swinish needs so well he hardly knew how to assert his lordship over her any more. They bickered a lot, and it would often lead to physical violence, where he’d chase her through the building with a lot of slamming doors and thrown furniture, or he’d suddenly snatch her by the hair before she was ready of it and he’d jerk her to the floor or kick her or simply cuff her in the eye or mouth. Rarely he’d bide his time until her guard was down, then corner her with single powerful hand about her neck, her reddening face gasping soundlessly while he poured out his fury inches from her eyes, her toes precariously touching the floor while her hands beat uselessly against him. But her fear of him was only physical now, he was no longer her father, but simply the ogre she lived with and served. He was an evil brute and she was well on her way to being one too. They deserved each other. She knew for a fact that one day one of them would kill the other in a fit of rage.

Thankfully fate saved her from this. When she was 14, she began to contrive ways to avoid the bed she shared with her nasty, vulgar brother who only grew more depraved as the years passed. Many nights when the weather was warm, she’d sleep in the stable. And on one such night she woke to the restless pawing and grunting of the horses as they bumped and kicked in their stalls. As her eyes came open, the first thing she noticed was that the ceiling was bathed in a strange orange light that seemed to dance unnaturally. For a minute or so she watched this curiously, wondering what it could be, when she became aware simultaneously of both shouting and a smell of smoke. A leap to her feat showed her The Dog and Pony encased in flame and smoke, fifty feet away. The heat of it hit her face like a shove, but she just watched it for the sheer phantasmagoric spectacle, as the horses grew more and more panicked behind her. The hot air made her sweat, but she stood rooted in place. Were her brother and father still inside? Were they dead? Were they trapped? Were they suffering? She realized quite quickly that she hoped, perhaps more than she’d ever hoped for anything, that they had not escaped. Everything would be easier if they were consumed in the same apotheosis that was incinerating that cursed building that had claimed her childhood, and if she might now somehow actually become free in spite of herself. Guilt tried to tell her it was wrong to wish death on her father and brother, no matter what they had done to her, but it was overwhelmed by a laughing, giddy relief that her torments would suddenly and abruptly end. When she finally stirred herself to get the two horses clear of the stable, she begrudged every moment she couldn’t watch the inn burn.

Her father and brother did indeed die in the fire. Everything was lost. She sold the horses to the livery stable for pocket money and appeared on her eldest brother’s doorstep, and he arranged for her to be taken in by a local matron who ran an orphanage and who might arrange to get her work in domestic service. He claimed half the money for the horses and seemed content never to see her again.