Bray shall not host

Born amidst the strife of the Goblin Blood, I was sold

to a wizard as an infant. The wizard worshipped a devil

and purchased me in order to use me as a vessel for

summoning a demon. She called me Host when she

called me anything, and used me as one might use an

apprentice until I hit puberty.

On the night I was to be sacrificed, I recognized which

component was missing as she prepared the ritual. I

made a few leaps of logic, and escaped shortly before

she began.

Destitute and ill-equipped for street life, I bounced

from begging to stealing to menial labor. I was never

very good at any of it. Early on in my career as a

beggar, starving and cold, a noble promised he'd give

me a whole gold piece if I could bray like a donkey.

I brayed. He laughed and told me I wasn't good enough,

and that he's have his men kick me if I couldn't bray.

I brayed and brayed until they finally lost interest. Then

I lay in the street braying. The other street kids called

me Bray from that moment on. It was better than Host.

After 4 years on the streets, I finally figured out a

system whereby I could get showers and make myself

somewhat presentable. I got work with a caravan

in charge of the donkey's they used to pull the wagons. Naturally, we were attacked by bandits. I was the only one who survived. I wandered into the woods. A terrible idea, but luckily I happened upon a kindly druid. She gave me a home and help me understand how to use what I had learned as a child. She provided me with the means of crafting my first spellbook, and though I took the mantle of Wizard instead of Druid, because of her influence, I chose the elemental school of Wood to focus on.

Jawool alone

Chapter 1.

Like every little Jawa, Jawool had no particular mom, or dad. His whole clan was father, mother, playmate, and co-worker. Jawool excelled at the team repairing tasks, but what he loved most of all was the scavenging tasks. He was rarely chosen for the scavenging teams, though, because he would wander off. While he fit right in, handing vibra wrenches and holding gearworks together - contributing clever ideas that built on clever ideas to build droid monstrosities that never should have been, during team repairs, he would inevitably get distracted by a shiny something and fail to call the team in to join him and fail to respond to team calls.

What they didn't know is that Jawool had mild delusions of grandeur when he found something. "If I find it and I fix it, it's mine" Was not something Jawa culture taught. It was his own personal little mantra, and it would have seemed, he thought, completely alien to his clan-mates who knew believed "If WE find it and WE repair it, it's OURS"

And then they were gone. Where once he had a hundred fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers, now he had no one. It was that independent streak that had saved hi, he supposed, but how he regretted it. If he had died with them all, he would still belong to the clan. But he was an orphan. For once, he was allowed to join the scavenging party. And, as always, he wandered off in search of something shiny that was all his own. But when no one came looking for him at nightfall, and the "Awk!" of sand people started to echo around the canyon, he followed his footsteps back to the Sandcrawler.

And he found the destruction. The annihilation of his clan and all their work.

Chapter 2.

We skip ahead 3 years. Mourning and scavenging what he could carry, Jawool made his way to Mos Eisley. He had some idea that he could join another band of Jawas on his way, but when he didn't cross paths with any and found himself in a Cantina, seeing all the Things that came into and left there that he had never seen before (and he had seen a lot of Things) the idea that if he could just get enough Things together, he could end the Empire single-handedly began to form. That the Empire was powerful because it had more Things than anyone else.

And this was how, wandering around, he discovered a light carrier, broken. He fixed it. He found it and fixed it, it's mine, he thought. But then its owner came up, asserting its ownership. This owner was  (Arlie's character?) and, fortunately, rather than blasting him, suggested that she could "buy" her light carrier back from him for a few credits (it should be noted that it was even fewer credits than she would have paid to have it fixed - he had never been in charge of negotiations) and a position as a repairer on her crew. She would find things and he would fix them.

She did not pay him well, but he had food and a place to sleep, and every so often, if he felt poor, he'd run about, claiming to "find" broken things on her ship and taking ownership over them until she'd buy them from him. Again, always for less than his labor was worth. It was an amiable relationship.

Chapter 3.

Jawool served with Captain Mokrel, a Mon Calamari, for 2 years, and acquainted himself with greater galactic culture. After this give and take with the Captain for 2 years, she wrestled out of Jawool, the beginnings of an idea that would form into his desire to build his own mercenary fleet and take his vengeance on the Empire. Not too long thereafter, the Coet Idea (Which is what Captain Mokrel had named his ship) came upon a hunk of space debris that they identified as the slagged remains of a number of T-16s not too far from what should have been a mostly-uninhabited planet. Captain Mokrel, with a grin, told Jawool, "Well, I can't find anything here. I'll take the Coet Idea downside for a bit of R&R. if you want to stay up here, you can use the pod. Don't know why you would though, since I can't find anything up here."

Jawool was no fool. Hopping in the pod and putting over to the mostly useless hunks of metal, his imagination lit up. Here were the humble beginnings of his mercenary fleet, he thought. Found and fixed, they'd certainly be really, truly his. And so he worked, cobbling together parts, building from the wreckage of a dozen forgotten, disabled, near-valueless hunks of metal, something that almost worked. And the day ended. And something tickled his memory. Some thought that was always near the surface, but got jammed down everytime it started to break through to his conscious thoughts. But he kept working, and he jammed it down.

But finally. Two days had passed. And the air in the pod tasted stale. There was still a lot left to do. But he could just barely fit the pod inside a cobbled-together almost-T-16, and guide it down with the pod's home-tracking system.

There was no smoke. Presumably there had been a column of smoke. Probably fire and screams. But all there was now was silence. The Coet Idea was less of a hollow shell than the slagged T-16s were. Jawool didn't want to look for a body, but a body confronted him. It could have been some other Mon Calamari, he supposed. Some other Mon Calamari who wore a crisp grey captain's badge on her left sleeve. Some other Mon Calamari who had struggled with a whitish blue fungus growing on her left flank. 

He walked past, willing himself to notice no more identifying features. And he kept walking, along the wave-slapped sand. 

Chapter 4.

For days, Jawool walked. By turns castigating himself for leaving his clan and vowing to never think of others as his clan again, because it hurt to much when they went and died on you. 

Eventually he came back to himself and realized it was irrelevant. Here he was, on a planet that, while clearly not uninhabited, seemed possibly inhabited only by Imperial Forces (for he never once imagined any but the Big Evil would be responsible for hurting him yet again)

He turned around and walked back to the destruction, steeling himself for the task at hand. 

He didn't know the burial customs of Mon Calamari, so he guessed as best he could. Paddling out on a raft made of insulation casing from the T-16's engine bay with the corpse of Captain Mokrel, he weighted her down a few of the smaller chunks of metal from the Coet Idea, and let her sink in what he hoped was an ocean.

Back at the ruined ships, he knew before he looked, but he looked anyways and confirmed that the components required for lightspeed were not there. And so.

Jawool spent the better part of a year there. And he made his T-16 (with attached Pod) into something monstrous and almost good enough... except there was nothing really to be done about making it light speed. It hadn't enough fuel to make it back into orbit for any more salvage operations, and even if it had, he'd been through those ships once already, and there was nothing to suggest any of them had been modded for lightspeed. He was stuck on this planet and a little afraid to draw any attention to himself. 

He spent his "leisure" hours pretending/practicing his piloting in the T-16, imagining taking on Star Destroyers (which he had never seen) and blasting them to bits in his tiny little sky hopper. He did a lot of imagining. Sometimes he imagined he could move bits and pieces around. More than once, he wished he had set a tool down next to him, and reached for it half-consciously to find that he had, indeed set it next to him. He must have done that with foresight, even though he remembered setting it down a few feet away.

The better part of a year alone with guilt makes one imagine some surprising things. 

Chapter 5.

Jawool slept on board his modded T-16. In a fit of frustration, he'd dubbed it Hubris, and painted the name on the side with the last of the stores of epoxy mixed with the dark sand for color. Regretting his inability to properly memorialize his expired friend, he'd later tried scratching it out and naming it simply Captain Mokrel. Now it was mostly an illegible mess. 

And he slept aboard the illegible mess.

A jolt in the night woke him momentarily, but his nightmares beckoned and he slept again. He dreamed of his clan. They were all on fire, but they were calm, fixing droids and putting together landspeeders that were made out of droids. Then he heard the screaming and watched from far away as they tore Captain Mokrel asunder and put her still-living limbs and head together with ship parts to make a monstrous part-droid, part-ship, part-person that screamed in agony and flopped about until it caught fire. He tried running towards it, with the idea that he could pilot it into the sea and heal it, but there was no sea only sand and besides, the more he ran the more shiny things to salvage cluttered his way. He was running in zero gee then, fighting with his whole self, but only churning uselessly against nothing. 

And then he banged his head. 

His limbs were churning against nothing. He was in zero-gee. And his head banged against the console. Where was he? In space. Getting pulled in by a tractor beam. He went to power up the ship and found it already powered. He had launched it into orbit? While asleep? While fiddling with controls, trying to escape the tractor beam, Captain Mokrel promptly died. Empty fuel cells. He watched himself get pulled towards a light freighter. It docked at an exterior port. The bay door opened without protest. He hadn't thought to jam them. And he found himself screaming in his native Jawaese at a very surprised-looking human. The human's mouth opened and closed a few times without sound as Jawool screamed about theft and the rule of fix it and found it and releasing the most horrible scents he could, when a hulking, furry beast bellowed back. It didn't stop Jawool, but it seemed to trip the human out of his surprise.

"What's a Jawa doing on a T-16 on the opposite side of the outer rim from Tatooine? I don't even need to ask. Scavenging like a vulture. You surely didn't scrag that hunk of T-16s, just found it. Well, sorry, little buddy. No honor amongst thieves. Well it's mine, and you took everything of value out of the heap. You can't do anything with it anyways. I got no problem with you. Stop screaming. Tell you what. I'll drop you at a port as a thank you for putting all the value in one place. Scream at them. I can't understand a word of it. This little T-16 is sturdy. Sturdier than it ought to be with what I left here. You got some skills, little buddy. Stop screaming."

And with that, the Wookie picked up the Jawa, carried him to a closet and deposited him there. 

And there he sat for a week. 

Halth

Qal'Deth wields Halth. When the Matron Mother sent a raiding party to the Duergar for pit slaves, they brought back a prize greater than they knew. The Druegar king was captured, and in exchange for his freedom, he forged Halth for Qar'tol, half minotaur, half drow champion and favorite slave of the House X'Larraz'et'soj. Halth was wielded by Qar'tol until his demise at the hand of Sarkoth, a minor noble of House Baenre. The sword was taken by House Baenre as spoils, and though those events led to the rise of X'Larraz'et'Soj, the loss of the champion's sword was keenly felt by the slaves raised from birth to be fighters in the pits. It had become an aspiration of many to one day earn the sword themselves. Together, the slaves conspired to return it to the house. The task was passed down from older fighters to younger for decades. The slaves learned much about the debts the other houses owed each other. The slaves who fought managed to manipulate the possessors of the blade through the decades. They did this most often by throwing fights, even lethal ones, but sometimes also by completing quests in unexpected ways, or by picking fights or instigating them between seemingly unrelated persons. The web of intrigue that led the sword back to X'Larraz'et'Soj touched every noble house. In the pits "to die for Halth" came to mean "To want something more than life". After manipulating the results of battles and betting, the pit slaves led the sword, which was infrequently used in fights, but also (though rarely) put up as huge betting stakes when the conclusion of a fight seemed foregone, and once to pay off a debt otherwise incurred in others, to a lethal battle in the pit of the House of Bastards between Drow settling a blood feud between Druu'giir, who now held the sword, and Baenre, who you remember once held it. The House Weapons Master turned a blind eye to the value of the sword when determining the entrance fee, thus allowing the Druu'giir noble Sharngarth to enter. Sharngarth had been mysteriously approached and told every weakness of his Baenre opponent, Paul'smiir, and had double and triple checked the information. Finding it good, he was confident of the outcome. Rumor spread, and odds were set well in favor of his winning. On the day of the battle, none of Sharngarth's attempts to exploit his opponent's weaknesses worked and the fully armored Baenre noble slew him, and took the sword, then, without collecting any favors disappeared, never to be heard from again. Only the slaves knew that Sharngarth's foe was not Paul'smiir, but their own champion, for just before the battle, they had captured, slain, and destroyed Paul'smiir and replaced him. The slaves keep this secret even from Matron Mother (but she knows, because the story is told in the fighting pits). Qal'Deth won the sword from the previous champion of the pits, Qot'shul, a half ogre, half drow who was only the champion for one fight, the one he lost to Qal'Deth, because his weapon proficiency only extended to a club.

Qal'Deth for all to see

Qal'Deth's Greatsword lay in a brightly colored scabbard.

"Half of the work of being a bodyguard is making sure you're noticed. It won't stop a dedicated assassin, but any opportunists will think twice."

His vest, his jacket, and his cloak hid a hundred pockets.

"The other half of the work is a surprise."

In each pocket was a pinch of this and that. Some twine, some cold iron, an eggshell, and a potion to darken the doorstep if an unwelcome Drow had crossed it. A book of verses describing the smells of various fungi. An empty silver stoppered flask. A dram of ale. A piece of dried meat. A ring of wood from the root of an old, old tree.

Most of them would never be useful. But one of them might, and so he carried them all.

Qhal'Deth who Bloodies

Qhal'Deth's fine shirt was torn and bloody, but his expression was satisfied. He walked at a measured pace across the pit towards his mother.
She shook her head.
A flicker of fear twitched at the corner of his eyes, but he turned towards the jagged cave that led under the stands.

He ignored the grunts and moans of a dozen fighting slaves with the practice of a dozen years in the pit. The guards barely glanced at him as he passed. He settled into his cell, decorated with wax sculptures and burnt herbs, and a near fortune's worth of individually worthless trinkets, trophies from each conquest.
Trying to think of nothing, Qhal'Deth stripped off his garments, and peered at the ring he had stripped from the mutilated body of his Orcish opponent. The ugly green of ill-tended copper, the ring was worth less that the hand that had worn it, had Qhal'Deth been given the right to a death fight. Today was Thirdday, though, and the stands were nearly empty. No sense wasting a death when so few were there to see it. It was a surprise even that mother had come. He'd hoped that meant she had an outing for him, but if she wouldn't speak to him in the stands, perhaps she was angry.
He bit his hand to drive away the fear.

MOTHER. He heard her swift footfalls before he saw her. When she came to the cells, no fighter didn't know it. The guards were silent and still always, but when she stepped in, even their breath was inaudible, even their hearts seemed to still. Qhal'Deth hid his bitten hand, folding it in the other on his lap, waiting like a noble overworld schoolboy politely expecting cake.

She came to his cell, the guard swinging Qhal'Deth's cell door open so that she didn't miss a stride. MOTHER. Mother took Qhal'Deth's giant head in her hands and pressed it to her bosom. She sang

      Far away the light of wrong
     Far away their doubt
    For someplace She gusts
     Closer now the right of strong
    Closer now be stout
   For Mother of Lusts

Qhal'Deth, now inexplicably sleepy, laid his head in her lap.

Mother murmured, "Tomorrow everything changes, dear."

Garlic Is a Superfood by Brendan Weinhold

A little boy cries somewhere. His wails are muffled by apartment walls and obscured by the sounds of cars and sirens and general L.A. hubbub. But the sounds of little boys crying are especially designed to be heard at a great distance, and so, even in a damp dumpster with the summer stench of molding oranges, Marie can hear the sobs.

Her flashlight is dim. A peach and an orange are the same until she feels the smooth bumps of the orange. This dumpster has been picked through already for the good stuff. The expired milk and barely moldy bread is gone. There are no eggs. There is no cheese. But there is moldy fruit, and dumpster diving is safe.

Weenis went to the shelter a week ago. So did Becky. Marie had found a couch to crash on that day. Met a Carol in the library. She wanted to know the city. Marie made the night last until the only sensible thing was to crash on the same couch Carol was crashing on. Not a well she could go back to, but there was oatmeal in the morning, and the couch was better than a cot. Marie felt like a regular ol' young person for a night.

Weenis went to the shelter a week ago. So did Becky. Maybe they'd found a good thing and were enjoying themselves somewhere. But good things don't happen. Not for a whole week. Marie bit into the orange without peeling it. Moldy. Gross. And the skin was bitter. But full of vitamin C, she told herself. And... ugh. Someone had thrown away garlic, she guessed. Garlic orange was not delicious.

The crying of the little boy, the hubbub of the city, and the rumbling of her own belly was the music that accompanied her meal. She ate the orange. Then she ate a moldy peach. She ate a tomato and some cilantro. Everything reeked of garlic. "Garlic is a superfood," she told herself, as she forced herself to enjoy it all.

Marie climbed out of the dumpster. Something moldy in there hadn't agreed with her. Maybe all the moldy things were battling for the dominance of which mold would reign supreme. Marie leaned against the wall of a bakery and breathed in all the good smells of fresh, fresh baking dough. She closed her eyes and imagined the smells were solid. A stream of milky white spongy breads traipsed into her mouth. The lights from the halogen lamp that lit the street illuminated each loaf as it tumbled out the door and into her waiting mouth.

That lamplight went out and Marie opened her eyes. Her belly hurt, and there was no traipsing loaf to chew. Instead, a tall shadow leaned towards her. "Oof, you don't look so good," said the shadow with the gentle lilt of a mother's concern. "Let me take you to The Shelter."

"No!" Marie belched. It didn't sound like "no", though, as the contents of her belly came up with the word. Gooey, colorful vomit splashed on the lady's black overcoat. Marie barely had time to wonder why anyone would wear a coat on a hot summer night in Los Angeles, when the woman picked her up like she was as light as a bag of groceries. Lying cradled in the woman's arms, still in desperate pain, Marie fell asleep, cozy and comforted despite everything.

Childer, Regnants and Panda