Legend of Ransera

Posted: **Wed Jun 22, 2022 7:53 pm**

Searing 25, 122

The Saint Cherikof Public Club

The Public Club, as the people who had spent enough money to be members called it, was named after a doctor and, in his honor, built to the highest standards of sanitation.

For example, it was well-known that breathing in too much city air could result in the contraction of consumption, so the Public Club had been constructed a hundred miles east of Gel'Grandal and its smokestacks and factories, accessible only via private train or dismal back-country road. Likewise, it is useful to remember that open air and high ceilings are essential to proper aeration, to which end the entire structure was built of the green marble known as serpentine, quarried abroad and brought back to the Imperium by freighter at enormous cost, and built with double-high floors. As for exercise, it is well-understood that undue exertion ages a gentleman prematurely, and so the hallways were practically awash in servants to ensure that the members and their guests were not inconvenienced in any medical or practical sense.

Finally, of course, it is plain to any member of the medical community that many terrible ailments fester among the impoverished populations- as such, there were none of those permitted here either.

An annual membership to the Public Club was prized among the inhabitants of Gel'Grandal. The combination of great expense and inconvenient location made it a perfect way to casually announce that your family's fortunes were burgeoning, and the opportunity to connect to some of the most influential courtiers of the Palace of Spires probably made the membership a bargain for the purposes of a great family. Valentin's family, however, was not a great family, and he could never have afforded a membership on a government wage, not without an incredible volume of embezzlement.

Instead, he simply turned up from time to time and told the concierge that OIR was conducting a surprise inspection; a mutually beneficial fiction which rewarded hard-working government servants with the occasional weekend getaway far above their station and permitted the Public Club a certain leeway when it came to providing their membership with... duty-free entertainments.

Although he was happy to impress himself upon the Public Club's hotel services, Valentin nevertheless tossed the small fee to the boy standing at the entry to the Public Club's shooting gallery. The large range, located just before the curtilage of the forest preserve, was technically a charitable entity, set up by the founder of Saint Cherikof just before the man died in agony from an infected gallbladder, and so the payment for entry and use of the facilities was minimal, and the staff were experienced and professional. Valentin liked that.

The Range had a variety of rifles which could be borrowed for a coin, but Valentin took his position at a booth with his pistol instead. He wasn't a hunter; if he needed to make a shot at long range, he wouldn't have a rifle at hand.

BANG! BANG!

Posted: **Wed Jun 22, 2022 10:59 pm**

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Carina was not an incredible creature of impulse; usually, she had some sort of plan in mind. This was not the case when, only a few days after she had arrived in the Imperial capital of Gel'Grandal, she had begun some research for her job. It was well known that Imperial firearms were superior, even to those in Zaichaer; their capacity for combining magic and engineering led them to greater heights in both. A double-shot rifle was the same price as a single-shot rifle in Zaichaer. Carina had arrived with some other Railrunners — a "vacation", as it were, an escape from fretful war preparations, or visiting family, or both made up their exuses. There was the true intention of bringing some of these Imperial firearms into the city for the Covens. While they had the benefit of magic, there was nothing quite like a caster shell to bypass Zaichaer's propensity for anti-magic. With the anti-magic sentiments themselves on the rise, no thanks to the new First Secretary, it was imperative that they were well armed.

Carina volunteered for this. She hated staying in Zaichaer for too long. It grated on her senses, it numbed the mind more than any substance. She'd never been to Gel'Grandal, but that didn't matter to her. She had grown used to Kalzasi, and the Imperium was far closer to Zaichaer, and she would be under much less scrutiny for traveling here.

Regardless of reasoning, Carina had spotted a lovely rifle on a shelf and immediately needed to have it for herself. They were importing munitions to sell to the Covens at large, but this was a gun that she wanted. As such, it was of dire importance that she purchase it posthaste. There was only one problem. Carina did not know how to use a gun.

She was suggested the Public Club, which had been somewhat of a mistake for both of them. Carina was neither rich enough to afford their fees, nor was she afforded transportation on their private train. Usually. But she was both pretty and confident enough to demand a ticket for the train anyway. Perhaps it was all those years working the ticket counter at the Pfenning that gave her such strength. Seeing what the wealthy could get away with from only a glare was an empowering move when one applied it to themselves.

Once inside the Public Club, such an insane distance away — and this was all still research, she told herself — Carina found the concierge, and if it was anything like the Pfenning, she would simply have to pretend. She was not an actor as much as a dancer, but with some effort and artificially inflated ego, she managed to secure a particularly firearm-adept servant to show her how to shoot. It was, of course, because her "husband" had been seeking a new hunting partner, and she wanted to surprise him. That was an easy enough sell, and it turned out the entry to the range was rather cheap.

The man who had been dragged into assisting her was rather insistent that she learned nonsense like "safety", but finally she was on the range, gun in arm, with the man more insistent about her posture. And then, she shot her first shot. It missed. The only other person in the range was a man with a pistol of all things, but she didn't pay him much mind. However, she arbitrarily decided to form a competition with him. She dismissed the servant, and with all of her newfound rifle shooting skill, tried to shoot better than a man with clearly more experience. She shot the second shot of her rifle, and didn't miss the target, so that was an improvement.

At least she was sober.

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Posted: **Thu Jun 23, 2022 11:06 pm**

There was something very calming in the art of shooting. Valentin could not, alas, claim to be a natural, but he enjoyed the practice anyway. The feeling of taking aim, the timeless moments as eye and barrel and hand focused as one, as the distance between shot and shooter streaked slowly into infinity, then came together... well, it was nice.

(The word was "zen", but Valentin understood neither the word nor the meaning of the word)

The Imperial bureaucrat knocked off caster shells one at a time; some of his colleagues were willing to pepper a wall with shots, figuring that a thirty percent chance to hit meant that six shots ought to do the trick. Inartful. The proper amount of force to be applied to any situation was always exactly as much as your goals required, and nothing more. As the chamber ran clean, he took the pistol in both of his grey-gloved hands and carefully cracked the chamber open, slotting more shells.

Today, Valentin was wearing his spectacles--he wasn't short-sighted, but he thought it was stylish to seem so--though he wasn't sporting a hat while out on the range. After he finished reloading, he removed his glasses and carefully cleaned them with a handkerchief, turning back to the target he had shot at to see how well he'd-

*BANG*

A bullet-hole appeared in the chest of his target, and Valentin turned his head, frowning, to see a young woman one stall over aiming a rifle at the target.

"What nerve!" the bureaucrat hissed to himself. This was a clear breach of protocol, and nothing in her dress indicated that she had the rank to pull shit like that with impunity. Well!

Valentin scanned the target, then the range around it until he spotted the larger shell which must have come from her gun. With a snapping motion, Valentin re-arranged the subspatial pathways between the bullet and his hand, twisting the shell around until he was holding it.

"Pardon me, miss, I think you dropped this near my target."

Valentin Valentin tossed the spent shell Carina's way, underhand, and turned his pistol on the target once more.

*Bang! Bang! Bang!*

Three shots and... well, two hits, though one was rather a glancing shot. Still, that and his smooth, subtle put-down were enough to put a sneering smile on the lawyer's face.

Posted: **Sat Aug 06, 2022 10:49 pm**

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Carina did not have to try hard to recognize the magic of Traversion. Though she got lucky with her first shot, and the man seemed embarrassed, given his reaction to her intrusion on his target, Carina wouldn't let him down lightly. With the same magic that brought the caster shell back to her by his hand, a very quick and subtle redirection with hitch once she saw his finger touch the trigger meant only one of his three shots really hit the target. She looked at his face to see if he noticed, and then..

She took aim once more and shot into the target, down and to the left of her first shot — but it still hit, a remarkable fact to her, and hopefully even more remarkable to her new "friend". Chances are he was a much better shot than she was when she wasn't purposefully manipulating the odds. Especially considering she had just picked up a gun for her first real time. She reloaded her rifle like the nice man had shown her, and spotted the caster shell on the floor by her feet.

Carina put a finger to her lips and looked at Valentin. "If it's your target, shouldn't you be hitting it?" She used hitch again and picked up the caster shell that Valentin had thrown at her without bending down. She walked up to him and held it out, a very slight pout on her face. "You don't want a souvenir?"

.

Posted: **Mon Aug 08, 2022 9:10 pm**

Oh, that was provocation, plain and simple.

Valentin pursed his lips, trying to devise a response which wouldn't make it look like he was mad. He was mad, of course, but to show it was a breach of condescension, a lowering of the self. No, his reply needed to be proportionate and calm, to communicate clearly to this woman how little he cared about her antics without making it obvious how much he cared about caring about her antics. Luckily, he'd had lots of time to think about very similar situations every single time anyone had ever embarrassed him even slightly in the past six years.

"Hitting a target," he said, his voice a model of derisive calm (he was proud of this, having no earthly idea that she could read his emotions anyway), "Is a relatively minor part of shooting. Missing the right way is better."

Yeah, sure, that sounded like a cool thing to say, like the sort of thing a cool person who wasn't angry might say. Let the stupid waif chew on that. He drew again and sighted the target, pinching one eye closed, then fired off a single shot.

*BANG*

This time, he caught the bullet in flight with a tiny slipspace portal. He'd taken care to fire precisely parallel to the ground; the caster shell wasn't even likely to hit the target as he'd devised the shot. It didn't matter; the precise angles of the shot did, for the sake of the trick. The hitch transported the projectile at a 90 degree angle exactly, and it rocketed into the sky.

(Shooting a bullet directly upward is, of course, a magnificently stupid idea for several reasons; one of them, the nigh-impossibility of actually attaining a perfectly perpendicular angle. The hitch, properly practiced, was significantly superior than the loose sense of direction and arm-angle for this purpose.)

Valentin waited for a second, then another. Then ten.

Twenty seconds after the bullet had been fired, it fell comically out of the sky and bonked into the straw 'head' of one of the humanoid targets on the field.

Posted: **Tue Nov 01, 2022 12:37 pm**

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Carina watched in disbelief as the caster shell landed on the straw head. It was not because he had been able to do it. It was not just for the emotions his aura had shared with her, her runic eye glowing slightly with its use, sharing his frustration and annoyance and his veneer of calm that was hastily painted over it. No, her disbelief was that he was so angry that manipulating the caster shell to fall onto the head of the target was the most creative solution he could have thought of at the time. Missing the right way? What in the fuck did that even mean?

But, even so, it was a competition now, and Carina knew exactly how to one-up him. She began channeling the aether through her traversion rune as she took aim at the head of a straw dummy target further down the range, and fired the shot, bang!, hitching the caster shell immediately. She knew that if she did it badly, she'd end up likely shooting herself — but luckily, the caster shell reappeared at a decent angle just behind her target, and the head of it was infiltrated from behind. She was far less mathematically precise than Valentin, and far more impulsive in this matter, and she was lucky that the caster shell didn't fly right through the dummy and hit her in the head. But she supposed they were designed to not allow it to

"Have you considered hitting the right way instead?" She posited, one hand on her chin now as she looked at Valentin. "Though I suppose your method is good if you want to scare someone..." She pondered... "Or..." She took aim once more with a caster shell loaded into her rifle, and shot at the same target dummy, again channeling the aether through her traversion rune with the start and end of the hitch in mind. The caster shell fired out of the barrel and — before it hit the target she was aiming at — reappeared in front of Valentin's own target, hitting it in the "chest".

"What a useful skill to have," Carina mused. "How enlightening."

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Posted: **Tue Nov 01, 2022 6:58 pm**

Nothing in the entire world is worse than coming up with a clever comeback line and having the subject beat it anyway, crushing you in a verbal jiu-jitsu which reaffirmed the original mockery and turned your own defense into abject humiliation. Those who would gainsay this imagine incorrectly. War? Famine? Genocide? Oh, sure, all worse on a societal level, to be sure, but those were the brutalities of life. This was a targeted, burning pain which left one almost unable even to fathom an effective recovery.

What could you say? Any new barb would look petty in light of your instant devastation. It was the sort of thing which could crush a career. But you couldn't just be silent. The score was only really tallied once the match adjourned, after all.

(And yes, all of this went through Valentin's mind even though there was absolutely no audience present.)

"Listen," the angry bureaucrat said, his voice weirdly earnest, as though he were laying bare part of his soul, "If you shoot someone in the head, they'll die. It doesn't matter how fancy the shot is, the best you can hope for is that they die. If you miss at the right times, in the right ways, you can accomplish so much more than that."

But what could that mean? Valentin aimed his gun, one-handed, and sighted loosely down the length, his eyes straining with concentration far surpassing anything he'd expressed previously. After a long moment, he fired... and the caster shell disappeared instantly. Not a single target appeared marked.

The bureaucrat released his long breath, then walked over to the rack, depositing the weapon. He gathered up his hat and coat, putting them on, and then tipped his hat to Carina before Blinking away, still totally unaware that her eye could trace even a path through slipstream.

A moment later, his "clever" ploy was unveiled. A shot rang out from the direction of the club's green, accompanied by the unmistakable clamor of breaking plates and falling silverware. Women's screams followed, and a group of the behatted gentlemen on the green made a mad dash toward the source of the shot; the shooting range's gallery.

Yes, surely this was an impossible trap to evade- how could Carina possibly escape several men in recreational suits slowly jogging towards her? And no chance at all of finding the perpetrator of this ingenious revenge, unless she had some hitherto-unknown means of tracking his exit!

Fine work, Valentin, you've got them on the ropes as always!

Posted: **Sat Jan 07, 2023 1:39 pm**

REVIEW

Valentin
10 EXP, can be used for magic
8 Lore

Injuries: Bruised Ego

Carina
10 EXP, can be used for magic
8 Lore

Notes: Valentin has received an F- on hiding his emotions.

Legend of Ransera

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