Mina gathered these things from all corners of the manor, put them in a luxurious burlap bag & headed down into the basement. She wasn’t sure how this trap would be assembled, but it seemed like she had the right parts.

That night Mina assembled a poor excuse for a trap & anticipated tugging on the line. The plan seemed better in her head. She waited & waited. She heard the chimes of the grandfather clock muffled through the floorboards. Bored, she practiced emptying her mind. The chimes of the clock struck again, two in the morning. Mina yawned.

Hours passed, Mina was ready to call it a night when there was a tug on the yarn. Mina pulled gently, expecting to see a rat following the… the cheese was gone!

Mina retired for what little remained of the night. As she tromped to her room she passed old Leon Faltig the valet walking the hall with a candle. “Any luck?”

“This isn’t going to be as easy as I wanted.”

“These rats have a smart leader, don’t forget that.”

More determined, she’d try the same trap with a better knot the next night.

The next day Mina read up on knots in the Älgknoge library. The floor was covered by an ornate rug. Packed bookshelves stretched to the ceiling. Sunlight bathed the room from a couple windows.

They had a few good books on knots, “On Knots” by Felix Zeichenfolge & “Maritime Knots” by Jakob Durchnässt. These were shelved with “Dawn Knots”, a book of jokes. She absorbed both of them & decided that a figure eight knot was going to do the trick.

In the basement, she put a new hunk of the stinkiest cheese she could find on the line, some old Midenstadter Kase that had been aging for decades. She set up the rest of the trap, running the line all over, through a series of loop hooks, with the pile of books holding the line in place.

It wasn’t a very complicated set up, Mina wasn’t very good at thinking ahead. Rudolf sat next to her, eyes alert, panting, at attention. Now it was time to wait.

This night felt like the previous. The grandfather clock chimed, muted through the floor. She spent her time marveling at all the canned foods on the shelves. They had beautiful labels. The Älgknoge’s had a finer selection of foods than any delicatessen she had ever visited.

They had pickled mushrooms from the Witchwood, hot sauce from the Badlands, clam chowder from the west, canned tomatoes from nearby, jars of Volzer sausages, dried meats of every kind, cheese wheels, bags of spices, tins of tea, coffee…

She chose a small cheese & ate it quickly. Just as she was about to help herself to one of the dried sausages there was a forceful tug on the string. She slowly drew it out & at the end she was confronted with… nothing. Mina threw the string angrily but it didn’t have enough weight to do anything satisfying.

Mina went to bed mad & after fitful hours slipped into the dreamworld. She was in an enormous room, she was supposed to be there. She was wearing an apron. Maybe it was her job?

There was a checkered floor that seemed to go on forever. Barrels lined the walls. The whole place smelled like the finest foods, all combining to make an incredible aroma. However, there was light-absorbing, thick, black blood everywhere.

From the corners of her vision, things kept disappearing from the shelves. There were sinister, colorless shadows lurking just outside of her view. Emerging from this darkness was the enormous leader rat.

The Rat King wore a top hat & spectacles. He rubbed his bony hands together & ate cheese from the pile next to him, throwing crumbs to his chittering minions. Her head throbbed with the overwhelming feeling of all these rats watching her.

A chiming music droned in the background. A pit quivered in her stomach. A powerless, lonely feeling washed over her.

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Mina woke up tired the next day. She was determined to take on the project despite her grogginess. These rats would be destroyed! Mina sharpened her Ratspike, polished her boots & leathers & got psyched up to fight the vermin.

She did her stretching regimen & repeated the Vermin Hunter mantra “Hygiene, Order & Completion” over & over again. Rudolf was excited by the energy but managed to sit calmly.

When the family was starting to wind down after dinner, Mina was drinking coffee in the kitchen with Eva Ölglas the cook. The speedy feeling of the coffee swept over her. She went downstairs with Rudolf to the basement.

Mina felt far more comfortable dealing with the problem directly. Not even trying to plan was much closer to her usual way.

She gave Rudolf the signal & he disappeared behind the barrels, barking & snuffling. A couple rats popped out & Mina easily speared them & plopped their lifeless bodies into her sack.

Rudolf let out a yip & popped out from behind some shelving, a rake mark across his face. He was visibly startled. Mina wiped the blood from his snout, consoling him.

Mina peeked behind the barrels where the nest was & saw nothing. She couldn’t kill the rats if they were hiding, she needed the dog or something to flush them out. Rudolf wouldn’t return to the nest, he would stop, stubbornly, tail between his legs. “I guess I have a chicken, not a dog.” She left for bed.

The next night Mina returned to the basement. Rudolf walked down the stairs slowly, tail between his legs, a few steps behind Mina & wouldn’t go anywhere near the nest, he was shook.

Mina had to find another way to get these rats. Killing rats was her only focus. An old feeling took over Mina’s mind.

The only thing she could focus on was killing. The Grim Reaper’s bony hand reached for her. Without words he asked for her help.

Mina ran to the shed in the garden. She barely felt the run there, & was suddenly confronted with tools of destruction.

She grabbed a can of lamp oil & a box of matches. Turning, she hurried back to the basement.

Mina dumped the oil in the rat nest & around it. The rest of the world was a blur, only death was in focus.

She soaked the area around the hole in the foul fluid. The ghostly, otherworldly, chemical smell of the oil would have overwhelmed her if she even noticed.

Mina struck a match against the brick wall. It didn’t light. She struck another match which flared up. She tossed the match onto the oil-soaked hole.

The oil quickly lit up, the room was rendered in high-contrast shadow & firelight. Grinning from ear to ear she waited for the rats to come streaming out.

None came. Some of the other containers lit on fire. Still no rats emerged.

Mina only then noticed the fire & seeing what might happen, she started to panic. She grabbed an old sack & batted at the flames. This seemed to work.

The fire started to dwindle. Everything seemed to be under control. Mina let out a big sigh of relief.

Then there was an explosion. Then another one. Then another one. Then another one. The Älgknoge’s collection of Schapps was going up.

Mina turned & ran up the stairs as a rapid succession of explosions barked behind her. She could feel the fire licking at her leathers.

Mina ran out of the Älgknoge Manor. As she caught her breath there was another series of explosions. The estate’s windows blew out & the building disappeared in flames.

A silhouette, back lit by the fire came running from the house, it was Schlüpfrige Schlange. He turned & watched the house burn.

“Where is everyone?” He said.

Mina froze, in shock. What had she done?

As she stood there, questions racing through her head, the sound of bells clanging signalled the arrival of the fire fighters & the police.

Mina was grabbed by both arms & dragged off to the police wagon that waited to the side. Mina saw Schlüpfrige Schlange glaring at her as she was driven away.

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They entered a small dining room dominated by a large table. The staff of the Älgknoge Manor sat around it. “Hello everyone, this is Mina Braun, our new Vermin Hunter. Here are our other employees.”

“Don’t forget me sir!” Said a dwarf, dressed in an outfit that looked like it would explode.

“How could I forget Marvin Beisser the Haus Dwarf.” Marvin beamed

with pride, his nose shining.

“Mina will be joining you for lunch today, make her feel welcome.”

Said Albert, turning on his heel & leaving the room.

Mina sat at the table & was brought a large plate of food. It was fancier than anything she ever had at the Olde Ostriche, & it was even fancier than the spreads that would be put out to entertain the representatives of the Grossers Guild at the Braunhaus.

“You got your work ahead of you!” said Eva with a mouth full of food.

“Rets, thee nestiest rets.” Spat Schlüpfrige.

“I won’t ever go near the basement! The rats would eat me as a snack!” Said Marvin.

All this talk got Mina excited. “Oh, I love a challenge.”

“I’m just glad they don’t try to go through the gate like ordinary -”

“They wouldn’t dare!” Said Eva.

“Rats are dirty.” Chimed in Bernard.

“They don’t go in the upper parts of the house.” Said Liselotte the maid.

“Thankfully.” Added Leni, the other maid.

“I never see them outside, don’t know how they got in.” Said Snedekar the gardener.

“Maybe they came from below.” Gummed Leon the nightman.

“They’re led by a real smart, big, old ret. I’ve spotted hem a couple times.” Said Schlüpfrige.

“The rats killed the last - “

Marvin was cut off, “I’m sure you can handle it.” Said Eva, elbowing Mina in the ribs.

That night, after dinner Mina patrolled the lower floors of the house. There were no signs of infestation. “I wouldn’t go into the basement after dark.” Said Liselotte, dusting some of the items in the enormous Älgknoge collection of crystal animals.

“One of the rats did this.” Liselotte showed Mina a scar on her arm. Mina was surprised by something pulling at her elbow. It was Marvin the dwarf.

“There used to be two of us. But the rats got…” Marvin started to sob.

Mina began her patrol that night with more caution. She was sure these were no ordinary rats. No sign of the rats appeared & it became clear that she would have to do some digging.

After her patrol Mina had trouble falling asleep. She had new, untested strategies for rat hunting running through her head. She would have to talk to the other people in the house, collect information, paint a picture of her new opponents. She fell asleep, the methods of these plans racing through her head.

Mina awoke the next day knowing that Rudolf was key to this new strategy. Since she wasn’t using poisonous gas, she could use her dog, he’d have the ability to get into small locations & flush the rats out.

You should never underestimate a dog’s nose. Most of their small brains were devoted to smelling things. They could smell something & know who, when & why. Rudolf was extra excited to finally help, he had spent too much time on the sidelines.

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The twins were playing outside in the courtyard. Adrian & Arnulf were each other’s constant companions & had the lowest view of things besides the dwarf & the baby. The twins were working on a makeshift fortress.

Adrian spotted Mina & hollered to her. “Hello Mina! We’re building a fort!” Arnulf barely made eye contact. Mina said, “Looks like a solid fort!” Mina slapped the side & ignored that some pieces of wood fell off.

Arnulf glowered. “So you’re here to kill the rats?” said Adrian.

“Yes, I am. But I need your help.” Adrian looked excited. Arnulf perked up.

“Do we get to kill them?” Said Adrian.

“I hate rats.” Said Arnulf.

“I know where the rats live.” Said Arnulf with enthusiasm.

“Me too!” Said Adrian.

Mina perked up, “I knew you would know where they were, that’s why I talked to you first.”

“We’ll show you where they are as soon as we’re done playing.” Said Adrian.

The twins were done playing. “Okay, now let’s have a look at this basement!”

“No, first you must tell us a story!”

“But…”

“You want to see it don’t you” Mina sat them down & began…

“Ahem… ahem! Gather round my friends & listen closely... for I shall recount a most curious & ultimately dreadful, little story.” Mina drew the boys in with her tale.

THE MOUSE, THE BIRD & THE SAUSAGE

Once upon a time there lived a Mouse, a Bird & a Sausage. These improbable companions lived in a squat, worn out hut. The Bird fetched wood, the Mouse got water from the well, stoked the fire & set the table & the Sausage was an unctuous culinary artist, sliding in the pan to coat it with his grease.

For a time, they lived harmoniously but it was monotonous. The Bird ventured out to get the wood, the Mouse did household tasks & the Sausage... with his greasy cooking, led everyone through the predictable patterns of consumption, defecation & following slumber.

However, such orderly arrangements rarely last. The Bird, encountering a leisure-loving avian, questioned his work. “Why toil so, while your companions relax?” The seed of discontent was sown.

The next day, the Bird refused his duties. A new, confused order placed the Sausage in the forest, the Mouse at the hearth & the Bird at the well.

The Sausage proved ill-suited to lumberjacking, the Bird made a mess of the kitchen & more importantly couldn’t control the fire & the Mouse was overwhelmed by cooking. The Sausage was abducted by a dog that claimed he carried forged letters.

The Bird, returning with the news of the Sausage, could not find the mouse. Distraught, he searched, only to find her dead in the kitchen that was burning. The kitchen fire set the house ablaze. The Bird rushed to get water. In his haste, he plunged into the well & drowned.

The boys fidgeted. Arnold reported, “We’ve already heard that one!” Mina frowned.

“You owe us another.” Said Adrian.

“But first.”

The twins made sure to have Mina & Rudolf lead the way, as they walked quietly down the narrow stairs that led to the basement. “There’s also a dumbwaiter that goes from the basement up to the kitchen.” Said Arnulf.

“I ride it when the parents won’t see.” Said Adrian.

“I won’t tell.” Said Mina.

“We’re here.” Said Arnulf.

Rudolf was obviously tormented, his biology & his training fought with each other mercilessly. The dog smelled all the amazing foods but also the rat’s nest. Tail down, eyes wide he walked alongside Mina.

“OK, we’re here. Tell me where you saw the rats.”

“The hole is right behind that barrel. Over there.”

Mina pushed the barrel to the side revealing a hole. Mina felt a compulsive wave come over her body. She wanted to destroy the vermin with every fiber of her being. She clenched her hands & counted to ten in her head, the surge of murderous desire washed over her. This required more strategy anyway. She would sleep on this problem & approach the next day.

Mina threw pieces of gum to the boys. “For your service!”

“How’re you gonna gittum?” Said Adrian between chomps of his gum.

“I’m still thinking on it, but I’ve got some ideas.”

The next day Mina got up, ready, she wandered the house finding things. A ball of yarn. A pair of scissors. A stinky cheese. Five heavy books. Several paper clips & a few screw hooks.

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The air was clean & fresh, renewed by steady wind. The streets were spotless, decorated with flowers growing in planters & in hanging baskets & flowering vines covered many pillars. Its pleasantness was in stark contrast to the over-ripe & used feeling of the Midenstadt & the squalor & desperation of the Untersadt.

The whole Obenstadt was surrounded by a ring of towers holding stone pods that looked like the rounded beakers of alchemists. These spheroids belched colored smoke from their chimneys & had another hole in their front, like an eye.

People lounged outside in cafe chairs sipping overpriced drinks & eating overpriced food & there was no trash, human or otherwise. It looked immaculate. Even the stone was a brighter color.

Representatives of all the major Hauses of the Empire had large clubhouses here, where they could meet, have a meal or peruse the libraries surrounded by works of art & antiques.

Each building was aesthetically aligned with the Haus that owned & operated it. Haus Bäredräck had a half timber building covered in animal skulls & racks of antlers. Haus Schadenfreude had a black building, padded with black rubber, chains, studs & buckles decorated the edges. It had no windows & only a slit in the front door. Haus Furzgeraush had an imposing building of marble, decorated with statues of Eagles & Lions, flanked by columns. Haus Fleischgeback had a building that looked like a suit of armor or submersible vehicle, metal walls held together by rivets, there were chimneys that belched black smoke, it felt like a warmachine. Haus Patchesitzen had a building that looked like a big, red barn with something that resembled a grain silo.

Mina passed these buildings on the main street of the Obenstadt, The VerantwortlicheStrasse. Mina finally came to Älgknoge Villa. As the Älgknoge family was under Haus Patchesitzen, their Villa had an agricultural feeling.

Everything about the house was oversized. Multiple stone chimneys jutted out of the top. The Villa was surrounded by a picket fence which contained a border of gardens that encircled the building which was in turn encircled by a massive porch.

The building was both folksy & ostentatious at the same time. A guard with a pitchfork, a wide hat, chewing on a piece of straw, greeted her outside. He looked like he should be tending a field, on stage. “How can I help you ma’am?” Mina explained her business & showed him the employment flier.

“Schlüpfrige Schlange will help you. Wait here.” he said, pulling a rope twice. Mina waited, she was getting used to the fresh air & the nice buildings, it reminded her of home.

“You rang?”

Presumably, Schlüpfrige Schlange appeared out of nowhere. He slid up, his big eyes, pointy nose & chin framed by his white, wavy hair & shiny forehead & bald spot. He was shorter than Mina but his presence was very imposing. Did he have a hunchback?

“I came about the Vermin Hunter protectorate position.”

Schlüpfrige Schlange looked her up & down, “Let me tek you to thee femmily.” He said in his nasal voice & outrageous, gulping accent.

“I can’t place your accent.” Said Mina.

“Südlicher.” he said.

Schlüpfrige Schlange led Mina through the garden, onto the porch, into the waiting room of the house. This house smelled good, a spicy, sweet smell colored the air. The floors were beautiful, parquet style, it was filled with handcrafted furniture, paintings of the family, rugs of complex design, there was an enormous grand piano & it was all topped with an enormous candle chandelier dripping with crystal. It was a deep contrast to the cramped, smelly, dark confines of the Local 13 Clubhaus.

“Wett here for the mestter.” Said Schlüpfrige Schlange & disappeared through a hidden door. Mina waited in the room, marveling at its opulence; the warmth & the pleasant smell. What produced that smell? As she waited she focussed on the constant tick-tock of a beautiful, glass fronted grandfather clock. The clock struck nine.

A tall, older man, with thinning blonde hair, of medium build & enormous mustache entered the room. “Albert Älgknoge, madam.” He said, shaking Mina’s hand, his skin was noticeably smooth.

“Nice to meet you, Mina Braun at your service.”

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“We Älgknoges are in agricultural shipping, working with Haus Patchesitzen.”

Mina paused & then blurted, “I’m probably the best Vermin Hunter in this city!”

“Ah, you don’t say? The best?”

“I’m so good that the leader of the Vermin Hunters kicked me out of their club!”

“Ah, if you’re so good, as you boast, return to this room in a half hour with five rats.” He said, smugly.

Mina doubted there would be that many rats in the whole block, but retorted, ”I’m up to the challenge!” She was off.

Mina had to think like a rat & fast. Running quietly, she ran to the yard. Mina quickly looked for signs of rats, turds, chewed edges, grease trails. She found them all, now to find a nest. She had to go behind the wood pile & behind the logs she found a hole in the wall.

She used her Ratspike to pry the wall away & revealed a nest of rats, paralyzed with fear amidst piles of torn paper & stuffing. She quickly went to work, impaling them all with her Ratspike, four in all. She bagged their lifeless corpses.

Mina had to find another rat. She ran as quick as she could, looking for rat signs. There was nothing.

Mina ran out onto the streets. They were clean & free from anything that rats would like. No trash. No crates. No filth. Did people actually live here?

Mina returned, defeated to the Älgknoge manor. Alfred waited in the living room, standing in the middle. Thirty-five minutes had passed.

Mina felt filthy holding this bag of dead rats, waves of guilt passed over her. Would she be kicked out of this family before she was even part of it? She had to snap out of it, remember that she had been asked to do this, this is what she did. She was a Vermin Hunter.

Albert Älgknoge was glad to see Mina Return. He was visibly surprised to see Mina with any rats. Mina held out the bag, it dripped blood on the floor.

Albert opened the bag & made a scrunched up face, “Four!? Good Lord. I’m embarrassed to have that many!” he paused. “You’re hired! You can obviously do the job, I have no doubt. Now to meet the family.”

Just as Mina let down her guard the room was filled with the Älgknoge children. They were trotted out, orderly like they were used to being on display. They were all blonde & blue eyed with good posture, clean clothes.

Albert listed out his family members & they greeted Mina. “You start tomorrow… you can stay in the servant’s quarters.”

Mina returned the Olde Ostriche. The contrast between the Midenstadt & the Obenstadt really brought out the shabbiness that she wasn’t aware of previously. Everything looked worn & picked over.

“I’m going to miss this place.” Grim Grimly noted her & came over. “I got a new job, time to move on.” she said.

“Moving on?”

“Just part of the program.”

“Seems like you just arrived, I can remember walking in that door! Well, the Old Ostriche always has its head in the sand for you.” said Grimly.

“Thanks?”

Mina walked back to the Älgknoge Manor with Rudolf trotting alongside. It was a definite difference to go to work at the same time most people were, it seemed normal, pleasant. She was used to being a creature of the night or at least being among them.

Upon returning to the Älgknoge Manor, she was met by Schlüpfrige Schlange who appeared out of nowhere & led her to their room. It was small, but nice. The windows brought in a ton of light that emphasized the cleanliness of the sheets & that the air was dust free, she felt dirty.

“Thee Mester will explen your duties right before lunch, your dog can join our pack, outdoors.” Said Schlüpfrige Schlange before backing out of the room & disappearing.

Mina took Rudolf to the kitchen which had an exit to the courtyard. She was met by a woman who was round & pleasant, she clearly enjoyed food. She was busily preparing what looked like lunch & was a whirlwind of chopping, stirring & fetching different things from various cupboards.

She stopped & addressed Mina - “Eva Ölglas is my name, You must be the new girl! Nice to see someone new here! Not just that horrid Schlüpfrige Schlange slithering around.” She went back to stirring the food.

“Nice to meet you, I’m trying to find…”

“What a nice pooch.” Interrupted Eva & handed Rudolf a piece of fatty meat from the lunch she was preparing.

“Courtyard’s right out that door.” She said, gesturing behind her.

After arriving in the courtyard, they were met by a pack of five dogs of varying sizes & ages.

The courtyard was in full bloom. Flowers of many colors were everywhere. A cacophony of birds was heard.

The family mascot - the moose, was repeated in statue form repeatedly. Enormous racks of antlers were used at every possible opportunity.

There was a large pool filled with fat koi, gulping air, in the center of the courtyard. Dragonflies flew in geometric patterns on the wind. It was an oasis.

Returning to the living room, Mina met with Albert Älgknoge in the hall. Albert gave Mina a big hug. She froze up.

“I’m so glad you’re with us now, I can tell you are going to be able to handle the rats & keep my family safe.” He trembled as he spoke. “I’ve had enough of these… these… beasts…”

“Yes sir, you can count on me!” Said Mina.

“The future of my family relies on you.” He was choking back tears.

Albert pulled himself together, wiping sweat from his head. “So, you’re already situated in your room, your dog is getting acclimated into the pack. You’ll eat with the servants & patrol for the vermin as the sun goes down. You’ll want to call it done at 3 in the morning, rise at 11 & have lunch. Let’s meet the others… they’re not bad, you’ll fit right in!”

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Hannes liked his role as the top dog of Local 13, with all the other members as his pack. He could tell that being a Vermin Hunter was temporary for Mina. He was a lifer, even if that meant his life was going to be short.

Hannes had to find a way to turn the rest of the Vermin Hunter against Mina. They had been so welcoming, now he had to give them a reason to turn against her. The only thing these guys cared about was doing their job & getting paid for it. It was a long, paid suicide.

Hannes finally came up with a plan. He waited until everyone had left the clubhaus. It was cold & smelled of stale beer & pipe smoke, the floor was filthy with layers of ash & spilled drink.

Hannes dumped the bundles of rat tails into a sack. Piled on top of each other they looked like filthy noodles. The smell was terrible. He produced a wad of chewing gum from his mouth & placed it on a piece of paper on the central table. He left with the bag, making sure nobody saw him.

When Mina showed up for work the next evening everyone was giving her the cold shoulder, & wouldn’t meet her gaze. Mina went to get her Ratspike, but her locker was completely empty.

All of Mina’s things were gone. She let it sink in, a cold chill ran from her heart to her belly. When she turned around, Hannes was standing there with all of the Vermin Hunter behind him looking disapprovingly.

“Stealing from your brothers? You’re out, go.” said Hannes, pointing to the door.

“Wot an ‘orrible person.”

“Wee accepted hyou weeth openn armss.”

Mina didn’t balk, she turned & left with Rudolf tailing her.

Back at the Olde Ostriche, sitting at her usual table, Mina took a minute to feel the rejection. She ordered a couple glasses of herbal Schnapps & sipped them, savoring the flavor, chewing gum planted firmly on the table. Grim Grimly limped up to her table. “Somethin’ on your mind darlin’?”

Mina paused, took a deep breath & said, “Nothing I can’t handle.” “Good. I never doubted it.”

He punched her shoulder. “You’re a tough nut.” He said, smiling & cleared her empty glasses.

Mina looked over the billboard at the Olde Ostriche for work. There were no jobs that she wanted or was qualified for. There were plenty of cult screeds, advertisements for blade sharpeners, adventurers wanting to find treasures, lost cats, competing breweries, sausage manufacturers & everything else.

As soon as Mina finished looking through the bills, she moved on to another billboard in the plaza. Again she peeled through the layers of advertisements for curse removal, traveling circuses, blessings by the Holy Order, prophecies, competing food stalls, secret societies, guilds, clubs, soldiers of fortune, lost dogs, miracle cures & the Scheisse und Kichern Novelty Company but there was nothing. She checked every billboard she could recall, sifting through countless fliers.

Weeks passed. Everyday Mina would find all the billboards she could. Walking through every corner of the Midenstadt, seeing all the usual characters. She would sort through all the fliers, losing hope with each piece of paper.

Every day - nothing. She was fortunate because she knew the Midenstadt of Brüttelburg backwards & forwards from spending every night for months covering its stone streets, killing its rats.

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Weeks turned into months & soon the chill of Autumn started to descend on the city. The old stone of Brüttelburg collected & amplified the cold. The Olde Ostriche was cheap but eating & sleeping there was slowly shrinking the stack of money she had brought with her.

The money lay in a sack on her dresser with her gum, room keys & a pocket knife. The only luxury she afforded herself was a piece of chewing gum that would last for a few days. The flavor & sweetness would be gone in the first half hour but she had learned when she was young to just keep on chewing.

When she couldn’t remember any more notice boards she started to ask around for others. She found herself in increasingly unfamiliar parts of the Midenstadt, unfriendly bars where everyone would stop their talking & drinking to stare, some almost private clubs, shoe repair shops, knife sharpeners, butchers & any other business with regular clientele. Nothing.

Mina started to get desperate, maybe this job wasn’t for her, maybe this city wasn’t for her, maybe this life wasn’t for her.

One day, Mina returned to her room & discovered that her money was gone. Maybe she had misplaced it. She searched on, behind & under every surface in the room. She kicked her dresser, cracking the wood.

With her money gone Mina was desperately looking for billboards. Still nothing. Was she going to have to go back home & face her family? Would she have to fight for a position in the Vermin Hunters?

Mina went down to the bar, visibly upset. Grim Grimly approached & could see that one of his favorite customers was upset?

“Oh, something’s eating you up!”

“I’ve got to go.”

“Well, time passes, that moment comes for everyone, everything”

“I guess so… but sometimes it’s too soon…”

“This kind of attitude isn’t like you Mina, what’s going on?”

“Have you ever been up against a wall?”

“Every day before I got this place running, it’s just part of the program.”

“Just part of the program.”

“Exactly.”

“Just part of the program.”

“It’s not a world of our making.”

“Just part of the program.”

Renewed, Mina set back out to find work. This time she talked to businesses. Each already contracted with an exterminator, usually the Vermin Hunters Local 13.

When Mina was out hitting the pavement, Rudolf started to bark. She turned to see Hannes Bok standing there. “Hello Mina.” Mina didn’t want to see this guy, she had put this time behind her. She didn’t say anything, barely meeting his gaze. “Are you still looking for work? I have a gig for you.”

Hannes stuffed a flier in her hand & left. Mina’s jaw dropped. She almost let go of the flier. Eventually she looked at the paper, “Vermin Hunter Wanted. Position: Protectorate of the Älgknoge family of Haus Bäredräck. Inquire at the Älgknoge Villa.” There was a picture of their family crest, a crazed, rampant moose with an enormous rack, bucking over a field of severed hands with a pair of dogs jumping up at its sides.

The next morning Mina got polished up, stuck her chewing gum on the bed post, left Rudolf with Grim Grimly & headed off to the Älgknoge Manor. The elites all lived in the Altenstadt, high & away from all the rabble & scum of Brüttelburg. up a huge flight of stairs that was at least half a block wide. The stairs began as a huge face of a man framed them & lead up to another more bestial face gate that led to the Obenstadt. It looked like a lion or some other kind of wild beast.

The people traveling the stairs were healthy looking with good skin, good posture & clean clothes. The air was clean, the smell of the Midenstadt became more tolerable the further she got from it. She could see the sky, she realized she had not seen the sky in months. The climb was almost grueling, she thought “Crime don’t climb”.

Mina traveled through the massive, bestial gate & was met with the comforting beauty of the Obenstadt. The buildings were neatly painted & topped out at a humble three stories, the air smelled sweet & the open sky dominated the scene above.

The Obenstadt was the top of Brüttelburg. From these lofty heights she could see all of the Eastern provinces. The jagged, Scharf Mountains to the west, the desolate, blasted wastelands to the north, the deep, mysterious woods to the east & the soggy, entrapping swamps to the south.

The Nobles of the Hauses had their every whim catered to here. Free from the clamor of the rabble, there was no apparent police presence. But the area had guards at the ready whenever a hint of trouble became apparent.

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Mina & Hannes walked to an enormous staircase that descended deep into the bowels of the city. It was nearly as large as the stairs leading up into Brüttelburg, with a huge, vaulted ceiling. The scale was awe-inspiring. Shabby looking people were trudging slowly up from the depths.

“Ever been to the Unterstadt? It’s alright, if you get past the smell.“ Said Hannes, holding his nose, waving the air in front of it & scrunching up his face.

As they descended the air got thicker & the smell worse, it also grew noticeably cooler. The smell of mold & urine dominated the air, with whiffs of chemical smoke from the factories, blood & offal from the slaughterhouses wafted in as higher notes, it was disgusting.

“How do people transport their things up & down these stairs? There’s no way a horse or a wagon could make it on these stairs. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen any horses in Brüttelburg.”

“They carry stuff in sacks or you can pay the Empire to move the things for you with their systems of pulleys & tubes.”

Mina & Hannes walked the cracked, stone streets. Everything was lit by torches as no sunlight had ever shone in this place. Dead animals & garbage was strewn everywhere. The cement was cracked & large holes opened up frequently. Some areas were flooded.

The Unterstadt was damp, cool & the air was thick. Most buildings were brick or stone with cracked plaster. Some windows were broken & boarded over. There was trash strewn around & the streets were blackened with the filth of the place.

The Unterstadt contained most of Brüttelburg’s factories. The light of the sun never reached this forlorn, claustrophobic area & fresh air was just as rare. The scum & filth of the Würstreich coalesced there, filling that soupy recess in the cyclopean ruins, an urban abscess.

The Unterstadt was damp & stagnant, choked with the smoke from constantly burning torches. It was made out of rotting ghettos, blood soaked slaughterhouses & indefatigable factories that spewed as much smoke & pollution as they did products.

Some areas had been flooded, others taken over by things that see in the dark & have mouth’s full of sharp teeth, others collapsed & empty.

The Empire who viewed it as a lost cause did not patrol the Unterstadt. This lawlessness allowed for both Goblins & the pagan Gütter to carve out niches for themselves. Gangs & private security patrolled the streets making it secure if you belonged & dangerous if you didn’t. The Unterstadt also contained several graveyards, because they refused the fees & indoctrination into the Imperial Necropolis.

Beneath the Unterstadt were the Dungeons where the criminals of the Würstreich were confined. Under that was the Necropolis where the dead were laid to rest. This was followed by rumors of a Verboten Zone where no one was permitted to go.

Rain never washed these streets clean. Buildings extended all the way to the ceiling, or at least appeared to, they disappeared into the shadows. The people looked depressed, their cheeks lacked color, their eyes were dull, their clothes were shabby, they were nervous, twitchy, sullen.

As they proceeded down a large artery, a huge sign stated Böse Branchen. The outside of the Böse Branchen factory had a menacing brick visage composed of the front door & windows. It spewed different colors of smoke from numerous chimneys that protruded from its upper areas. It was riddled with tubes like a rotting apple full of worms.

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Mina & Hannes came to the large front door & knocked. As they waited Mina heard the dripping of condensed water falling from the cool stone ceiling to the filthy street below. Rats, beetles & other diminutive filth crawled in the shadows. The door was eventually opened by a spectacled older man in a lab coat with wiry white hair. He had an eccentric air to him & looked them up & down before opening the door all the way.

“Hello hunters! I am Dr. Gashaltigeteile! I see you are engaged in the war against the vermin.”
“We’re all out of Totengas at the clubhaus.” Said Hannes.

“Let me arrange a shipment for you.”

“Can you tell me about the gas, doctor?” Said Mina.

Walking through the laboratory he said, “We are the primary producer of this gas, thanks to the Böse family.” He said with a smile.

“This gas was originally developed by a coterie of Imperial Alchemists to kill off the Goblins & other monsters that infested the caves of the Würstreich. Killing rats was just a positive side-effect. Those that inhale the gas find their lungs liquefying & they cough up blood, unable to breathe. The Vermin Hunters use the gas to reach their targets that are hiding in cracks & crevices, whether this is to kill the vermin or drive it out into the open where they can kill it with the…”

“Ratspike,” said Hannes.

“The Totengas can be identified by its sweet, chemical odor & the itch in the back of your throat that a small whiff generates, if too much is inhaled these symptoms are followed by a painful death of drowning in a chemical haze.” Hannes raised his eyebrows & looked at Mina. “I’ll have a shipment of canisters sent to the Clubhaus.”

On her first day of active duty, Mina lined up with Rudolf at her side, ready for duty. Hannes looked at her & the dog, shook his head, “No dogs Mina!”

Mina made a face & she felt like Rudolf could feel his exclusion. “No?”

“Dogs don’t know how to avoid the Totengas & usually die coughing up blood. Their little lungs fail after a few weeks of inhaling the fumes. Rudolf has to stay at the clubhaus with the pack of dogs. In a saner world the dogs would be used for the rats, but that’s not the world we live in. It’s just us & the gas. You’re partnered with Felix tonight, gittum!”

When Mina & Felix returned to the clubhaus with enormous sacks of rats, their lifeless bodies were thrown in large bins. “What happens with all these dead rats? Do you burn them?” said Mina.

Felix shook his dead, “Zese binss are collected every couple of dace by shifty men wearing shebby top hets & shebbier clothes. Zey throws ze rat bodies in large sacks & probably does something nazty with the meat. Cheap zauzeges? Who knows. We tie ze remaining rat tails in bundless of zirteen. Those bundles are put in piless & then the city buys zem from us & we get ze monies.”

Night after night, Mina stalked the darkened, torch lit streets & dingey alleys of Brüttelburg, with a list of problem areas & a booklet of maps of Brüttelburg. Mina usually ran with a partner, but sometimes by herself. She would stop at an area, kill all the visible rats, bag them, cross that place off her list & then move on.

When a bag was full she would drop the bodies off at the clubhaus & then go back to work. She killed thousands of rats & there were always more to take their place.

In the early morning after a night of hard work, the Vermin Hunter relaxed in the clubhaus. Some nursed beers, some smoked pipes, everyone was exhausted. “The war on rats is never-ending.” said Hannes, smoking his pipe, feet in heavy boots up on the clubhaus table.

“This isn’t something we can win, we just can’t stop.”

“Eternal Vigilance!!!” said everyone, raising their beers. There was a grim, unpleasant tone in their words, a world-weary acquiescence.

Mina was a natural Vermin Hunter, she killed twice as many rats in half the time of the rest of the Vermin Hunters. She became cheerier & more energetic with each kill. She had spent most of her life spilling the blood of invasive pests & this formalized what had been a hobby up to that point. Soon she was recognized as the best Vermin Hunter around.

Mina found herself getting more & more competition from Hannes Bock. He was used to being the best & he wasn’t anymore. This person who he had brought on rose through the ranks & bested them all. Mina was the brightest star.

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Mina let out a huge sigh of relief. She was so happy to be out of “Das Loch”. It was the most uncomfortable she had ever been by choice. The Vermin Hunters extinguished their torches & Mina was embraced by them, glad to have her among their ranks.

The group returned to the main room & several crates of Scheisterbrau beer bottles were produced. “Time to celebrate!” said one of them. The Vermin Hunters took off their masks & cloaks revealing their young faces.

Many crates of beer continued to appear, be emptied & the night grew increasingly rowdy. Tales of near deaths, miraculous kills, enormous rats & worse filled the air. The dogs slept in a pile. Empty bottles, spilled beer & ash collected on every surface.

Again the city was only beginning to wake up as Mina stumbled back to the Olde Ostriche. The sun was bathing everything in warm, golden light. She walked slower than usual & stuck to the shadows. Rudolf, excited to not be stuck in the chaos of celebration, shadowed her. The wound in her hand throbbed as she walked the streets of the Midenstadt.

People were sweeping in front of their shops. The smells of baking bread, roasting meat & simmering broths filled the air. Mina bought an Orobrotzel from a vendor that wore the circular breads on a string around his neck. Mina was content. Brüttelburg could feel cheerful sometimes, under the right circumstances. Mina finally came to the Olde Ostrich & slept hard.

After sleeping through the day Mina headed back on the familiar path to the Vermin Hunter Clubhaus, she imagined that this would be very common for her. She stopped & got a couple of sausage rolls, giving one to Rudolf who choked it down.

“How could you even taste that?”

Having arrived at the Clubhaus, Mina was in the main room, accompanied by half of the Vermin Hunters. Hannes was out so she was to be trained by Felix, an older Vermin Hunter with poor posture, nasty skin & a raspy voice from inhaling too much poisonous gas over the years, he was twenty seven, but seemed at least three times that.

The Vermin Hunters had their training areas off of the central room.

“How big is this place?”

“Beeg enoff.” Felix wheezed, “Nisse to meetch you misss Mina. Hokay, hyou need to go srough ze trials before hyou are able to go on vermin hunting wis a partner.”

Felix led Mina to the an enormous room full of beams, tubes, fences & things hanging from the ceiling. “Welcome to ze Trial room. Zis room will tesst your agility.” he said gesturing. “Hyou musst first balance on ziss beam, then travel to ze platforms & leap between zem using the rope, zen hyou must climb ze tubes, from ze top of ze tubes you must walk on ze beam between them, zen you must shimmy down another tube onto ze platform. Climb ze fence between ze platforms, to ze tunnel entrance, zen you must take ze tunnel back to here.”

“I think I got it, something like this?”

Mina jumped into the obstacle course & quickly, gracefully conquered each step just as Felix had listed. She came back to Felix, breathing harder. “Fantasstic. Now you must hold your bress as long as hyou can!”

Felix led Mina to a water tub & pointed to it. “On ze count of sree. One. Two. Sree!” Mina paused, the water looked sick, disgusting, syruppy.

Mina gathered her wits & dunked her head in & Felix began counting, flipping over an hourglass. As Felix passed 240, he started to look more concerned at Mina. He kept going to 300, growing increasingly concerned. He kept glancing at the hourglass. Mina pulled her head out of the water as Felix hit 349.

“I could have gone longer but I didn’t see the need.” said Mina with her eyes shut tight as the disgusting water dripped down her face. Felix shook his head.

“Next is Das Loch.”

“Not this thing again. It was easy the first time.”

“You must climb down ze rope into Das Loch & kill a rat in ze dark wissout a weapon!”

Mina hesitated at the edge of the hole, the darkness pulled at her. The pit throbbed.

Mina took three deep breaths & cleared the fear from her blood. Mina slowly climbed down the rope & disappeared into the black.

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There was a long pause followed by a sharp squeal.

Mina returned up the rope, biting a dead rat. Its blood dribbled from her mouth. She looked determined, scary. Felix grinned.

She spat out the rat into a bucket that was waiting for such a thing.

“Next is ze Wheel of Dess!” A couple of Vermin Hunters lead Mina into yet another room with a colorful wheel in the center cocked at a 70 degree angle. She had seen this device before. Something just like it was used in the knife throwing tricks at the travelling circus that would set up in the field near her house.

The Wheel of Death was decorated with paintings of rat skeletons, cheese wedged & skulls. The acolytes helped Mina up onto the disc & cuffed her hands & ankles.

Mina distracted herself thinking of the circus, she was particularly intrigued by the freaks. She wanted to kill them & yet, she found herself comfortable in their presence. The wheel started to spin.

The wheel began slow & then it sped up. Faster. Faster. Faster. Mina felt all the liquid in her body trying to go to her head & feet simultaneously. Her body heaved but nothing came out. The room blurred. Then it all stopped abruptly.

Mina was undone from the wheel but the room kept spinning. Mina was dizzy, she fought back her breakfast, but threw up on the floor.

“Finally, you must defeat ze Schiessübungen!” Felix led a disoriented Mina to the final room. Felix pulled a lever, there was a klang! & hidden clockwork animated a series of false rats, false beetles, false scrogs & false scrags. These creations jerked into action, scuttling around numerous obstacles.

He handed her the preferred weapon of the Vermin Hunter, the Ratspike. “Ze Ratspike iss a traditional tool used by farmerss to kill ze rats that plagued zeir barns & chicken coopss, zpreading disease & cutting into their livelihoodss. Eventually zis farm tool migrated its way into ze hands of ze Vermin Hunter in ze cities to help rid them of vermin. Ze three tines are specifically suited to killing rats as zey avoid the outer tines & gets killed by ze middle tine.”

“Ze tines are barbed so zat ze impaled, but still living rats are unable to wriggle away. Zey zymbolize ze zree pillars of ze Vermin Hunter - Hygiene, Order & Completion! You must defeat ninety percent of ze enemiess in a minute… On your marksss. Get ready! Set! Go!”

Felix pointed to the automatons. Mina flew into action, dispatching the pest puppets, one by one. It was like a choreographed dance. Each move ended with the destruction of one of the robots. They shattered in a spray of splinters, bits of fur, screws & springs.

She moved to an unheard beat, one… two… three… spike. One… two… three… spike… Soon all of the mechanical menagerie lay in pieces.

“Kongratulationss!” Said Felix.

Mina fought to catch her breath.

“Now we get you fitted for your Lederkombi, get you a Ratspike & some canisters of ze Totengass. But firsst, your paperss.” Felix handed Mina a stack of papers & pointed to the end, where there was a line to sign. Felix pointed to a desk with a pen & ink well waiting. Rushing, Mina wrote her name in the black ink.
Felix melted a pool of red wax onto the ribbons he placed below the signature & he stamped the seal of the Vermin Hunters & signed his name & date below. “Now it iss official!” He said.

Felix walked Mina to the tailor around the corner who measured her for a uniform & received her own Ratspike. They were out of Totengas & needed to get some more directly from the Böse Branchen factory. “Hannes will take you zere hwen he returns!”

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Mina woke up as night fell on the city & made her way back to the Vermin Hunter clubhaus. She passed lamplighters, vendors shutting down their stalls, street prophets collecting up their pamphlets, amulets, oils & idols, people on their way home from work, travelers looking for a place to stay, butchers wearing blood spattered aprons, bakers with flour coating their clothes, barmaids heading to work, beggars talking amongst each other & pickpockets looking for prey.

Mina easily made her way back to the heavy wooden door of the Vermin Hunter lair. Mina knocked three times. There was a long pause & then it creaked open slowly. She was met by 16 boys in black, hooded cloaks. They covered their faces with ludicrous party masks & false noses. Each one carried a torch.

Mina froze in her tracks, she didn’t know if she should laugh or leave. One of the hooded Vermin Hunters took Mina by the shoulder & drew her into the dark room. The door slammed behind them. The room was stuffy, almost warm.

He said, “Ask.”

Mina gulped & said, “I want to join you.”

“No.” they all said in unison.

Closing her eyes & breathing deep, Mina paused for a minute. She blinked hard & asked again. “Let me join.”

“No!” they said more forcefully.

Mina shivered & closed her eyes again. She took a deep breath & a third time she asked, “Let me join!” They said nothing, the air between them was heavy, awkward. Eventually one of the members walked forward.

He was carrying a dagger & a squirming rat. “Take the knife.” Mina took the knife. “Put out your hand.” The Vermin Hunter bound the squirming animal onto Mina’s hand. “Kill the rat.”

Mina paused, drew her breath & then she stabbed the rat, driving the blade through the animal, into her hand & the wood of the table. She bit down hard & tried not to show how much it hurt.

A few of the Vermin Hunters audibly gasped through their masks. One of them took some of the rat blood on his fingers & drew a line horizontally across Mina’s face from cheek to cheek. “Time for your initiation”.

“First you must endure Das Loch.”

A Vermin Hunter cleaned & bandaged her bleeding hand. “That’ll make a good scar.”

Mina was led down a cramped hallway. They came to a small, dark, round room with a hole in the middle. Everything was made of stone & sounds echoed off the walls.

Mina was directed into place & told to leave her arms at her sides. She was bound with chains, over & over again. She could barely move. Around & around they went with the rope, now she could barely breath. She was filled with dread, what could possibly be in that hole? Anything.

The room was cold, cavernous & damp, it smelled moldy. Mina shivered from the combination of fear & cold. The hole was pitch black but squeaks & scratching could be heard echoing up from its depths.

There was a winch to the side of the room, a chain emerged from it & went around a loop on the ceiling. The chain ended in a massive hook. Mina was led to the side of the hole.

She was sweating & practiced the breathing exercises her father taught her, but they didn’t help. The hole was just wider than she was & was pitch black. It could have gone down forever. The hooded initiators attached Mina to the hook.

Another Vermin Hunter placed a blindfold on Mina. Mina felt so vulnerable in this position, she could tell it was serious based on her solemn initiators. The chains creaked as the winch was turned. Mina felt herself raised off the floor & then lowered.

The pit was cool & the air was moist. The sounds from above became muffled & soon became inaudible. Mina disappeared into the black, the hole was eerily quiet. She felt her heart beating rapidly like a baby bird’s.

“Let me outta here!” She screamed, wriggling like a bait worm.

The Vermin Hunters raised her up & helped her out of the ropes. Mina tore off the blind fold & ran out the door.

Mina careened down the streets back to the Olde Ostriche. She retrieved Rudolph from the kennel & shut herself in her room. She had never wanted to be a part of something as much as the Vermin Hunters. She didn’t want to face them ever again.

The next morning Mina didn’t feel so embarrassed, she felt the throbbing cut in her hand.

“All that for nothing.” She kicked the dresser.

She thumbed through the stack of Würstmarks on her dresser & sighed loudly. She’d have to get a job soon. But what kind of job?

Mina hit the streets of Brüttleburg in an attempt to find work. She had never looked for a job before, but how hard could it be?

Mina found one of the many notice-boards in the main plaza where people posted all manner of flyers. None of them called her. She’d have to find some more.

But first she needed to find something to eat. Mina wandered the plaza looking for something appetizing & soon she found a vendor selling pancakes, rolled into tubes & filled with various puddings. Mina got three of them, found a spot to eat & got to work.

Rudolph eagerly paced around, hoping for a bite. It was in this distracted way that he missed the squeaking of leather & the arrival of Hannes Bok.

Mina’s heart sank. “I thought you’d never want to see me again.”

“Actually, I was hoping to run into you. I think you’ve got it!”

“You do?”

“Yes, want to make another try at the Club Haus?”

“Do I have to cut myself again? This thing still hurts.”

Hannes laughed & clapped Mina on the shoulder.

“Not this time… okay, come back to the Club Haus in two nights & don’t freak out this time.”

“Right!”

Hannes left & Mina stopped & gave a little praise to her good luck. She gave the last half of the pancake to Rudolph.

Mina spent the rest of the day wandering around the Midenstadt. She watched a puppet show, caught a Bombast band & avoided being pick-pocketed by leaving most of her money at the Olde Ostriche.

When she returned to the Inn she ordered some cheap food & a beer & sat at her favorite table.

“You’re lookin’ pleased with yourself!” Said Grim Grimly approaching the table with her dinner.

“I was looking for a job & then I found a job.”

“You could always wash dishes here.”

Mina laughed, “I think I washed enough dishes growing up.”

“It’s always on offer.”

He put her food & drink on the table & went back to the counter.

A couple days passed & that night Mina returned to the Club Haus. Again she was ushered in by masked men & led back to the pit.

Again she was blindfolded & bound & wrapped in chains. Again she was lifted up & then lowered into the pit.

She could hear little bodies all around her. Their claws scratched on the rock. She thought of her mother. That terrible night. The darkness.

In that cramped, claustrophobic cavity, Mina blacked out.

Minutes passed.

Mina came to & didn’t realize that anything happened. It was all black.

The rats got used to her presence & their squeaking increased. Everyone above was quiet, Mina was sure they could hear her heart beating.

Mina made no noise, there was only the sound of the rats, so many rats. The rats were all around her. It was surprising that they weren’t climbing on her, clawing at her face.

All Mina could think of was the things that the dark concealed & having no power over them, being totally prone. Thirteen minutes passed & the leader of the ceremony gestured towards the ceiling. Everyone raised their torches high. Mina was winched up & out of the hole.

“One of us.” said the lead Vermin Hunter. Taking off Mina’s blind fold, a couple of Vermin Hunters unbound her.

The group chanted, “Hygiene, Order & Completion! Hygiene, Order & Completion! Hygiene, Order & Completion!”

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The market was full of vendors of all types. The place was teeming with people buying & selling everything & anything that could be sold. Items of all shape, size & degree of condition & legality were spread out on the ground, on blankets, on tables, in kiosks, you just had to know where to look.

There were so many stalls. Assorted scum peppered the massive waves of unremarkable people Behind the peddlers were shops, restaurants, temples, banks, taverns, clubhouses & more.

The ripe smell of filth was mixed with roasting meat, perfumes, cheese & cut flowers. The city smelled undeniable, alive, fertile. This was the Midenstadt, the second layer of Brüttelburg. The majority of citizens lived & business thrived here.

The Midenstadt wasn’t as claustrophobic & miserable as the enclosed bottom layer or as open & airy as the top. It was the middle, tolerable & lively, not too good, not too bad.

Mina bought a sausage in a roll & ate it while taking in all the sights. Rudolf licked his lips expectantly & trotted closer to Mina.

A younger brother of the Holy Order accosted her. “Do you know how that sausage is made?”

He was young & unsure of himself. His head was freshly shaved, the skin underneath was wildly lighter then that of his face.

“I don’t care how the sausage was made, I love sausage! How can anyone in this God forsaken place dislike sausage?”

He waved handfuls of charms on chains. “But the eating of such things is unclean! The meats are anonymous & the spices excite.”

“Take a look around you! This whole city is unclean! Life is unclean!” Mina yelled, dropping her sausage for Rudolf.

The young brother sputtered & stamped & his Meister hurried over, whispered in his ear loudly, “She is unclean.”

The two of them crept off.

“Hmmph.”

Mina was slowing down & yawning. She slumped against one of the ancient stone walls. She noticed the abundance of rats in the shadows as she fell asleep.

Mina dreamt about rats jumping over a fence. Each one would leap & a voice would call out from the heavens. Five… Four… Three… Two…

Mina awoke to a young man standing over her, “One.” he said, kicking her lightly. Rudolf was standing at attention, but not losing his mind, so the man was probably safe.

It was dark & the market square was empty. The man was clothed in a form fitting, black leather uniform from head to toe, only his face showed. His outfit was dotted with studs & skulls, it squeaked when he moved.

He was unremarkable, not tall or handsome or charming. Slight of build, his squat, acne-scarred face framed by short, blonde hair. “Hannes Bok.” he said, helping Mina to stand.

Hannes was a Vermin Hunter. Part of a low-class of professional exterminators that fought back the hordes of pests that were continuously encroaching on the city streets of the Würstreich.

The Vermin Hunters were usually smaller, weaker, unwanted boys. They were too weak to be meaningful on the battlefield & they wouldn’t be missed when they died at 25. They would squeeze themselves into places that rats & other filth squirmed.

The Vermin Hunters had lives that were unpleasant, intense & abrupt. Their rank was pulled from the unwanted, orphans & other young men who were discarded for various reasons.

The Vermin Hunters channeled their lack of broader acceptance into the comradery to be found in their chapter & the necessary service they provided for Brüttelburg. Still, no parent wanted their children to join their ranks.

The Vermin Hunters wore uniforms constructed out of layers of leather to protect them from the scrapes & scratches of the scum they were tasked with killing. However, they were not protected from the gas bombs that they use to flush out those vermin that are in hard to reach spaces.

Hannes sized her up. “You look new, wanna meet my mates?” He said, gesturing in the distance with his lantern. Mina was ecstatic to be welcomed so quickly. “You’ll fit in great as long as you hate rats.”

“Who doesn’t?”

“You’d be surprised.”

Mina followed Hannes & when he got ahead of her she just followed the light of the lantern as they weaved through stone alleys, around garbage piles, over used crates & empty barrels, past religious proselytizers, hungry dogs, wandering drunks, further & further into the heart of the city.

They wound their way deeper into the city, past many other vignettes of desperation. Mina found it difficult to ignore these scenes but she had to to keep up. Finally they came upon a door in a dark alley with the emblem of the Vermin Hunter, a rat skull with a pair of crossed weapons underneath painted on it.

The door was framed by clumps of rat corpses that were nailed in place by their tails. Around the clumps of rats were long strips of parchment printed with the Imperial Vermin Hunter charge. The dead rats & official documents made for an unwelcoming feeling but an unforgettable door.

“We’re here.” Said Hannes. He led Mina through the doorway into the clubhaus of the Vermin Hunters Local 13. She was met by a dark room & a wall of bitter, pungent smelling pipe smoke. The room wasn’t large, it was lit with candles, there was a heavy table in the center, surrounded by chairs.

The walls were covered in layers of stained fliers. Shelves with dusty, taxidermied trophies of particularly large & nasty rats, various beetles, scrags & rat skulls were on display.

Bundles of rat tails were tied together & lay in piles around the room. A few of the Vermin Hunters slumped in chairs nursing beers in bottles, a couple smoked pipes. They watched Mina & Hannes. They couldn’t have been older than fifteen. Rudolf joined their raggedy pack of dogs in a festival of sniffing.

The Vermin Hunters were dressed head to toe in black leather. They all wore heavy black boots. Their clothes were lined with studs & metal skulls.

“So you’re Vermin Hunters? My name is Mina Braun.”

“The Vermin Hunters, local 13, at your service. I could tell you were one of us just by looking at you. I could tell that you like to kill.” Said Hannes with a knowing smirk.

Mina was surprised, “What do you mean by that? What’s wrong with me? I’m not a killer.”

Hannes looked at her solidly, “Sure. I can tell.”

“Assuming I could learn to like killing vermin, what are you proposing?”

He laughed, “You should join us, we need new blood & like I said, you’ll fit right in.”

“First you’ll have to be initiated.” said an older, more worn-out Vermin Hunter, he was probably 23.

A dull looking Vermin Hunter with dark circles under his eyes said. “Nothing worth being a part of is that easy.”

Hannes nodded. “Meet us here tomorrow night, Knock three times.”

Mina didn’t have to decide if this was the right move. The only problem was, she had to find something to do, somewhere to be, until then. She loved killing & wondered how Hannes could see it in her. Was it obvious?

Mina had been intimidated by the sight of Brüttelburg but found it welcoming. As she walked the streets of the city, it was just beginning to wake up. It was still dark, lamps shone in the street but rats were carrying on in the shadows, under crates & behind barrels.

Mina kicked over an old potato crate, rats & half-eaten potatoes scattered around the alley. “I’ll come for you later.”

Mina booked a room at the Olde Ostriche tavern. The Olde Ostriche was an old, cheap, seedy establishment. It had its own rotation of liquor-soaked, crusty regulars who kept the seats warm & the heavy old tables covered in cheap food & cheaper drink.

Travelers from all corners of the Würstreich were a common sight. The place was loud & smokey. A grizzled old curmudgeon named Grim Grimly ran it.

Mina ate a bowl of soup; potato, cabbage & some hunks of cheap meat floated in a heavy, salty, greasy broth. The flavor of the soup cut through the smell of smoke, stale booze & sweat in the noise filled common area. Some people ate & drank with determination, others caroused. After she finished her meal, Mina went up the narrow stairs to the second story.

She found her room off an impossibly cramped hallway & flung herself onto the small bed. Rudolf crashed in the corner. Mina slept hard.

• TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK!

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Even though it was a cheerful, sunny afternoon the crows watched her hungrily, like mortuary employees looking for a fresh job. They could sense her vulnerability.

The path wound as the woods thinned out. Mina spotted the East Bridge, a massive old, shingled crossing that spanned one of the many forks in the Stinkendblüt River where the four roads met.

This part of the river didn’t stink of slaughterhouse & factory waste like the waters closer to Pigskin Port. Still, people didn’t drink or swim or fish in any part of the river close to that cursed city.

As Mina approached the bridge she spotted a mostly human-shaped silhouette. It was standing guard in the middle of the road at the bridge entrance on the far side of the river.

The thing was obscured by the shadows but it had a tail. It was hunched over & had a hopping, hobbling sort of walk.

A cold sweat accompanied Mina’s throbbing heart. Mina could see that the creature had a jagged blade. The figure paced nervously & hadn’t spotted Mina yet.

Mina took Rudolf to the side of the road. Somehow, the dog hadn’t smelled the creature. If he had, he’d be an explosion of barking, charging up the road to fight.

Mina paused & came up with a plan to deal with this problem. She would stay hidden & cause a commotion, unknown to the beast. He would advance to find the source. She would unleash Rudolf & attack. Mina was exhilarated at the chance of killing this creature.

Mina threw a dead tree branch into the road, it landed with a crack & rustle of leaves.

The beast spun & hobbled towards the branch. As it got closer Mina could make out that he was a mix of man & rat. He ran with a distinct limp, as if he wasn’t used to standing on two legs.

The rat man was breathing heavily, spittle dripped from his tooth lined mouth. He carried a filthy, sharp piece of metal that screamed infection. The rat had a worm-like tail that waved behind him. Mina could smell on him the loathsome smell of a species that had only recently developed the culture of wearing clothes.

Mina let Rudolf free & charged the creature. The dog bit hard & wouldn’t let go even as the monster swung around violently.

Mina charged in after Rudolf with her knife ready. The rat-man tried to raise the alarm, but as he opened his mouth to squeak his breath was stopped. He received her blade in his gut. She was taken with the fury of battle & stabbed over & over again.

The rat man fell & Mina continued to stab him in & out with tremendous ferocity. His blood pumped all over the ground. She kept stabbing him long after he stopped quivering.

Mina wiped off her blade on his worn tunic & took a deep breath.

Mina grinned. It felt good to kill the rat, to direct her fury & sadness into the intensity of battle.

When she arrived on the East shore of the mighty Stinkendblüt river she noted that the woods stopped at the other side of the bridge. The river was fast-moving. Its milky appearance from the silt that it brought down from the mountains betrayed its depths. It served as a barrier between the safety of the Farms & the danger of the forest.

The farmlands surrounded & fed Brüttelburg, the biggest city in the eastern provinces of the Würstreich. She knew little about the city except that good people should avoid it. Despite those feelings, or maybe because of them, she felt drawn to it.

The sun was going down. It wasn’t safe to be out at night. She would have find an Inn to stay at.

Luckily there was a small village on the way to Brüttelburg. She got a meal & a room & slept soundly.

The next morning Mina set out. The sun lit up the farmlands, adding a golden hugh to everything.

The road wound its way through the fields & soon she saw the top of Brüttelburg looming in the distance & mountains further to the east of that.

The city was archaic & abnormal, a majestic merger of rock formations & man-made construction topped off with a series of towers that looked to hold rounded furnaces that belched pink smoke.

Brüttelburg was layered in three parts like her sister’s wedding cake. Each stratum had a massive, monstrous maw that served as an entry to that area. Wide stairways led up & through each of these mouths. Brüttelburg was more than just a big city, it was a sepulchral, pulsating megalopolis, a living thing.

Mina wound her way on the road to Brüttelburg followed by Rudolf, through collapsed stone battlements & enormous megalithic structures placed there by some forgotten race the city filled more of the horizon.

Flag-topped, pointy towers jutted out of the top & red shingled roofs covered every surface that sheltered the city from the weather. Mina found herself staring in awe at the city, It looked like it had been summoned out of the ground. She couldn’t believe the immensity of Brüttelburg. It was the biggest thing she had ever seen.

She approached the first step of the entrance, past clusters of peddlers selling their wares & every other kind of person slowly making their way inside. She was reminded again of the city’s enormity, losing count of the wide, stone steps as she made her way in.

Occasionally the air would shift out of Brüttelburg & the smell of concentrated, cramped people, human & animal waste was almost overpowering. The stench stung Mina’s eyes, she tried to breathe only through her mouth to give her nose a break. The summer sun was cooking the filth. Rudolf sniffed the air furiously, it was almost too much for the dog.

Brüttelburg was the oldest, biggest city in the Würstreich. It had been built on the ruins of an ancient, alien structure. The epic & imposing masonry had a feeling as if it was grown or magically manipulated & then filled in & built on top of by the newer occupants.

The city had an eldritch, mysterious, tomb-like nature to it. The tribal Valhal avoided the place calling it “die Krypta”, letting it lie dormant for centuries. Emerging from the Valhal, the Würst actively dismissed what they saw as any kind of superstitious motivation so they claimed the city as their own.

Once inhabited, Brüttelburg grew rapidly. The city operated as a Bulwark for the spread of Imperial power. The Würst stood on the shoulders of giants & discovered many of their secrets.

Mina finished climbing the steps & wiped the sweat out of her eyes. She was met by a huge market square surrounded by tall walls which were enclosed by a shadowy, smoky ceiling far above.

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The Braun’s people had irregular teeth, threadbare clothing & smelled of boiled cabbage. The Rävbollars suspected the Brauns of being Gütters or at least having a connection to those shabby pagans.

The couple’s family & friends sat on either side on sturdy benches facing the wedding party. They waited drunkenly for the ceremony to begin.

Father Brennenzittern was officiating. He was the regional Vickar, in charge of the local priests of the Holy Order who he kept in line with shouting & whacks from his cane. The Father was accompanied by a pair of dwarfs, one wore an enormous papier mache head that looked sort of like the Father’s, only the dwarf’s legs emerged from the bottom. The other dwarf was chained to an enormous leatherbound book.

Father Brennenzittern wandered the roads giving raucous sermons on correct living, striking the listeners & noting on his book of maps decaying corpses to be purified & collected by his assistants later.

Father Brennenzittern was a member of the Hefig Brotherhood - a drunken order within the Imperial Religion that focused on fermentation & its cousins pickling & breadmaking. They were known for maintaining the oldest & most traditional ways of beer & bread making & pickling.

Tonight, the compact, spectacled, gristly old man served the forces of love. Dressed in the starchiest black, wreaking of alcohol, nose looking like an overripe strawberry the father stood out, an ink spot among the white outfits of the couple.

Everyone tapped their glasses for silence. Father Brennenzittern took a deep breath & began. “We have come here to unite Bjorn Rävbollar & Agnes Braun in holiest matrimony!” His voice thundered out beyond the pulpit if thunder had a strange, higher, urgent tone to it.

“The solitary road is difficult. There can be shuffling monsters, feisty pagans & rotting corpses causing all manner of trouble along the way!” He sweated. “If these obstacles are met with two then there are twice as many hands to mete out the necessary beatings!” He gazed knowingly at Bjorn.

“The lone person is simple, uninteresting! It is only when they are spiced & aged with another of their kind with the right mix of ingredients… that they meet their life’s destiny. Salt & spice!”

“There is a simple greatness to be understood in the lone wolf, let us not be confused. But when you take that simple building block & mix it with another, adding that element you can’t rush; time, the lone ingredient can become something complex, something worthwhile!”

Mina felt very uncomfortable thinking of her sister like this, as an item in an incomplete recipe. Maybe it was more about what these things implied for her, that she couldn’t imagine herself in this role. “You are all in line!” Father Brennenzittern pointed at the crowd, snapping Mina out of her gum chewing introspection.

After the ceremony, relieved, the couple exchanged rings, kissed & were pronounced united in the name of the Empire & the Holy Order. It was done so quickly.

The Braun & Rävbollar parents received lines of guests who paid their respects. Guests stuffed envelopes of money into the new couple’s pockets & wished them the best on their journey together.

The drink flowed, people were loud, bumped against each other, they dropped their drinks, knocked over decorations, someone sitting down missed their chair, some couples disappeared, children caused a ruckus, their parents were too distracted to pay attention.

There were long tables for eating, the best cooks in the Eastern Provinces were assembled to prepare the meat-heavy meal. They were loaded with small bites to pick on before the meal was served.

When dinner was ready, the waiters hurried to & from the Rävbollarhaus kitchen with platters & trays loaded with sausages stuffed with all manner of beast & spice with as many mustards in pots, Sauerbraten, breaded & fried pork & chicken schnitzel, Jaegerschnitzel with a thick mushroom gravy, potatoes made into hot & cold salads, soup & pancakes, red cabbage, Sauerkraut, wobbling aspics, apple sauce, apple chutney, marinated herring, pork roast, bear ham, Goulash, meatballs, dumplings & gravy boats.

An enormous cake was rolled out & waited at its own table to be cut by the couple & served to the guests. The cake looked like a chocolate Ziggurat, with elaborate black & white icing. It was produced by the Schickehose Bakery out of Brüttelburg. Viktor Braun reminded them of a favor avoiding taxes & got the cake at a steep discount.

Another round of drinks were poured & everyone was seated, waiting for the round of toasts. Glasses were tapped with spoons. Bjorn’s best-friend Hans Grösste stood & swaggered. Hans was massive, like a wall given human form.

Hans’ drink tilted dangerously close to spilling & he held a note in the same hand. His numerous medals swung with his stagger. He sweated an alcohol tinged sweat that would draw suspicion on any other day.

Raising his drink Hans said, “I’ve known Bjorn forever, we have hunted through all these woods here.” He swung his arm around.

“When you’re out for boar, but come across a mob of gibbering Nacht Drek looking for a scrap, you have to be ready. Bjorn was always ready.” Hans sniffed loudly. “When I wasn’t ready, Bjorn was ready.” Hans wiped a tear from his eye. “Now, Bjorn is ready for this. I wish you two the best.”

Pow! Pow! Pow! Cannons launched streamers & confetti over the guests. The dancing began. The Braun’s had hired a Bombast band to play, their pounding oompah music sounded out through the woods. If the trees could dance, they would. The beat thumped in people’s chests.

The band played loudly, their logo was a pair of sausages, crossed under a skull. The Bombast began as a military music, something to get soldiers through the horrors of war & intimidate their enemies. Over time, their sound became the popular music of the Würstreich.

There was crashing percussion. A chorus of children soared out over the instruments, alongside other singers with voices that would punch through the sound.

The musicians were dressed in flashy, colorful outfits evoking the mythological heroes of the Würstreich. Cannons would occasionally blast confetti, streamers, small gifts & candies over people’s heads. Fireworks launched into the sky & exploded, coloring everything in reds, blues, yellows.

The enormous mandibles of a deep ebony, shiny Mampf Mampf beetle poked around the corner of the cake catching Mina’s eye. It was unclear if the beetle was going to try to eat the cake or just exploring. Either way the beetle was dirtying something sacred. It was an intruding desecrator.

Slowly, the beetle crept around the cake. Its antennae wobbled back & forth, probing the dessert. The bug paused, as if considering its next move. Could bugs even do that? Think about the future?

Mina sprung into action, hurtling towards the cake. Viktor gasped & dropped his drink as his daughter launched with such violent force.

Someone else had been watching also. Sebastian, Bjorn’s man servant had been staring intently at Mina.

Sebastian burst from his seat, flailing towards Mina to save the wedding. He scrambled towards her, arms outstretched, hands eager to clutch the young woman.

This move accentuated Sebastian’s ridiculous elongated appearance. Mina would have laughed had she not decided he was an enemy.

As Sebastian clawed his way towards Mina & the cake, she stepped on his head & over his body. He bit the dirt, the sound of all the air being squeezed out of his lungs was deeply satisfying. Mina continued to race forward.

Mina grabbed the beetle & slammed into the cake. It in turn, hit the ground with a moist thud.

What an unimpressive end to something so magnificent. One of the chef’s thought to himself, “All this magnificent food ends up dropping into the shitter.”

The band stopped. The guests gasped & Mina stood still, feeling all eyes on her.

“I’ll deal with you later!” sputtered Viktor gripping Mina’s arm hard as if it would control her & everything into the future.

Agnes was horrified, but also unsurprised. It was a strange mix of emotions. The chaos took some of the pressure off her.

Sebastian tried to talk, holding up a finger, “Rafblmlch!” He said through a mouth full of dirt.

The Rävbollar family performed an act of great embarrassment. There were the flutters of fans, darting eyes, hushed tones & stage whispers about the wild Gütter blood in the Brauns.

Mina ran off into the woods. She didn’t look back.

A tremendous guilt welled up in her stomach. She felt that her family needed her to be something she couldn’t be. She wasn’t sure if she would ever see them again & for that moment didn’t want to.

Mina made her way to the main road with her dog Rudolf following behind. Rudolf was an extra medium, black & white dog. His size & appearance disguised a killer instinct & an unstoppable drive to protect his master.

The road wound through the woods. The forest seemed darker, lonelier, more dangerous than usual.

• TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK!

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Frida & Mina got ready when it was still dark out. The world was rendered in undetailed silhouettes of deep blues. They put on their boots & lighter overshirts would catch the wind. Armed with nets, several sacks & a light breakfast, they trekked into the woods to find the tiny soldiers.

Mina was the first to spot a Skrackerklack beetle strutting on the woodland floor as the sun rose. The Skrackerklack got its name from the sound it made by rubbing its wings together. She excitedly pointed the beetle out to Frida who grabbed it right behind its mincing pincers & plopped it into the bag.

Mina was too overwhelmed by the beetle’s unintelligent, automatic, unvarying attempts to trudge onward to do anything else but squeal with delight. Frida grinned with her little sister.

The sisters spotted another beetle once the first had been bagged. Then another. Then another. Then another. Schwarze Schluckers, Hopplas, Mampf Mampfs & many other varieties. Soon the sacks were squirming & could contain no more.

Mina & Frida sat on a mossy log tree in a spot of light that would warm them. Frida opened up the kerchief & they had breakfast. They lay down their catch & prepared lunch.

The bags of bugs writhed slowly, catching Mina’s eye. The beetles called to her. They wanted to die.

Frida was taking a bite of her sausage as Mina jumped in the air & landed with both feet on the beetle bags. There was a crunch & a look of tremendous disappointment crossed Frida’s face.

Mina tread furiously on the beetles until there was nothing crunchy left, only the squish of their innards. Frida screamed.

The girls kept the Braunhaus place so clean, infestations of neglect were very rare. Still, the occasional bugs & rodents would make their way inside.

Mina was possessed by some otherworldly energy to do a war dance of vermin murder. She would leap over chairs, ricochet off of walls, crawl under tables, bounce off couches, until her prey was no more. All without breaking anything.

In her quest to control the small things around their house, Mina learned that all sorts of tiny creatures hid during the day under the old, forgotten boards that lay scattered on the grounds. These boards concealed a musty, stagnant, moist world of shadows.

She would pull up a board & lots of squirming things, not accustomed to light or fresh air would scatter or freeze in surprise as their darkened sanctuary was opened up.

Mina laughed evilly & brandished the club that usually hung from her belt on a leather cord. Mina mercilessly mashed the clustered outcasts until they became an indistinct mix up.

Mina’s oldest sister Agnes became engaged to Bjorn of the Rävbollar family. She was 23 & Mr. Braun was starting to get worried that she’d be in the house forever.

The Rävbollars were connected to the royal Haus Bäredräck. Haus Bäredräck controlled the woods & surrounding areas & the Rävbollars were the overlords of the civilized portions of the Witch Wood.

The Rävbollar family played the role of woodsmen, although it was doubtful that they labored. They traded in all manner of wild game, delivering the delicious carcasses of forest creatures to the finest kitchens in the Würstreich.

Bjorn had been brought by the Braunhaus for years to endure dinners under the watchful eyes of Viktor & seeing if he would get along with any of the daughters. He clicked with Agnes & they would slip away to the porch to hold hands.

The Rävbollar family operated a huge hunting lodge near the woods by the Watchtower. The ornate estate was embellished with profuse forest trophies, antique rifles & the family’s own coat of arms. Their crest was a rampant fox spilling a basket of acorns. It was repeated on anything that could be emblazoned with this image.

Bjorn was an avid hunter & a crack shot. He spent most of his life wandering the woods hunting for game & fishing in the rivers with his manservant Sebastian.

Sebastian was an older man who had no family of his own, he owed his entire existence to the Rävbollars. He had the skinny, stretched-out proportions of a spider monkey. His skin looked like an allergic reaction irritation given earthly form. One would start to itch just looking at him.

Little did anyone know Sebastian had what he would describe as the perfect Scratch habit. He kept a small amount of the drug in a glass container that was buried under pine needles. Every morning he would go to the jar, smoke a tiny amount of the drug & let it carry him through the woods for a couple hours.

Despite this, Sebastian was loyal & trustworthy & had pledged his life to the Rävbollar family & Bjorn in particular.

From a young age, Bjorn could easily handle the many monsters that infested the woods, dropping them unceremoniously with a shot between the eyes. No time was wasted on these constant distractions, they were coolly dispatched. The real challenge was to come home with an animal that spent most of its time hiding from, not stalking you.

Early that summer the wedding day arrived. The Rävbollar family hosted the union on their enormous property, nestled deep in the woods. The family had spent the week before scouring the surrounding area for any possibly dangerous creature that dared intrude.

There weren’t that many abominations in the woods at that time of year. Just some Goblins looking for trouble, an old witch & her zombie assistant, a lame werewolf with a crutch, various giant insects, a lone mountain wizard collecting ingredients for spells, flying scrags & slithering scrogs. They were all mercilessly shot & their limp bodies left on display in the woods as a warning.

Bouquets & garlands of white flowers were everywhere on that warm summer day. A light breeze of sweet smelling air scattered their petals.

Many barrels & bottles of fine drink were present. They were marked with red wax seals, ribbons of distinction & even accompanied by the occasional paperwork.

The Rävbollars broke out their own award winning Schnapps. The drink was herbal, it made you feel invigorated, like you could set your breath on fire. Some of the barrels were uncorked & getting the guests in a fuzzy mood to welcome this new partnership.

The place was packed with people finished in their finest furnishing. Their cheeks got redder & with that came an increasingly rosy view of the world. They started to sway, stumble & neglect their normally nonmoving social norms.

You could recognize the extended Rävbollar family by their red hair & matching complexions. They were large & well-fed, tall, porcine. It was surprising that they spoke English & didn’t squeal.

The men wore traditional lederhosen & feathered caps, cultivating all manner of facial hair, medals from arranged wars dripped from their vests. The women wore dirndls, which accentuated their freckled bosoms. Their hair was braided tight, they were loud.

The Braun’s circle was varied. They were part of the merchant world & collected friends from all over the Würstreich. Their original blood family was an embarrassing, oddly shaped, potato fed swamp folk, subject to drink & surly emotional outbursts.

TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK!

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Most reviews of DUNGEON DEGENERATES start off with a warning that this is not a game, specifically an art style “for everyone”. Then the reviewer will talk about how they love it.

I have come to understand my work like a stinky cave cheese. Some people love it, but it really isn’t mild cheddar. However, it got me thinking, people are fine with & embrace exotic foods. What I go for is the visual equivalent of spicy food.

Think about it this way, every time you go & serve some of your favorite stinky cheese, you feel the need to apologize for your advanced taste. People are used to Mild Cheddar, but that kind of bland familiarity is the thing that should be apologized for.

“I’m sorry that I’m such a baby that I have evoked the blandification of society.” is what should be coming out of these people’s mouths. You should not apologize for having tastes that are spicier than the beige dungeon that mass appeal has pushed on us all.

This blandness is not expected in all corners. However, for some reason it is expected in board games. I’m still shocked that there have been NO visual clones of DD in the board game space. There have been a couple visually bold TTRPGS.

However, when I go to my Friendly Local Game Store, DUNGEON DEGENERATES still pops off the shelf & it’s the only one out of thousands. It’s been that way for almost ten years. I remember clearly going to Guardian Games with Katie & noting how all the games on the shelf stick to a muddy, desaturated palette. That’s still the trend.

I was so visually starved & ultimately bored when I was growing up that the visual intensity of things like psychedelic gig posters & their throbbing colors worked on my young brain like drugs, even though I wouldn’t touch the stuff until my late teens.

I still have a traumatic response to being visually starved. The lack of visual interest reminds me of that pervasive gnawing boredom. Growing minds have a tremendous need for the unexpected, that challenge is absolutely necessary.

You can draw a direct line between the neon paint used by Weirdo Monster & Detroit Custom Car Culture father Stanley Mouse & how he took those things to the San Francisco Bay Area to be part of the 60s counter culture.

You can continue that lineage as the imagery soaked into my young brain via Museum shows of psychedelic posters & the use of those Weirdo Art standards in an enormous vein of 80s “gross-out” culture.

I’d argue that the bold pink used on the first series of Garbage Pail Kids cards in 1985 was as much influenced by the old Weirdo Art as it was by the pink of the Sex Pistols “Nevermind the Bollocks”.

Punk has always meant “a challenge” to me. While it obviously has its own structure, its own aesthetics, its own sound, its own way of life, at the core, the important thing is a willingness to challenge.

I’ve had a surprising number of stores & reviewers refuse to even give the game the time of day because of the name, arguing that their platform is only for “family friendly” games.

The content of the game is much more wholesome than “Cards Against Humanity” for example, which was being sold at Target the last time I checked.

The thing that is being avoided is a willingness to challenge. A willingness to entertain disruption - to be ready for the unexpected.

I’m sure you’ve seen those memes about color leaving our society. Cars being dominated by white & black, McDonalds going beige, all color being leached out of everything.

If I’ve learned anything over my life, it’s that the crowd can frequently be wrong. Especially if the crowd has no leadership that is declaring the importance of things being visually stunning.

Everything has been so up in the air & uncertain in society for the last… ten years that the place of control has moved to the places of consumer choice that are easiest to decide on. Boring, unadorned jackets & white cars with no bumper stickers have taken the place of societal standards.

If the common performance is to point out the non-blandness of a thing as a way of prefacing your enjoyment of it - stop that ritual & go for it straight away. No more apologizing. No more prefacing.

The world can be so much more exciting & visually charged, it doesn’t have to be that the go-to is mud. This extends beyond visuals into everything, things can be full of flavor. Things should be full of flavor.

x SEAN

Need more color in your life? Check out GOBLINKO, the home of the art I’ve produced since 1999.

The Brauns lived in the Braunhaus, a three storied timber-framed building topped off with many gables. The Braunhaus stood at the end of a path near the tangles of the Witchwood. Dangerous things only occasionally appeared on the road. The Brauns lived in a more civilized part of the forest.

It was a substantial, spacious, flourishing habitation that required extra order to keep the wilderness of the Witchwood at bay. If they didn’t sweep the stoop, seedlings would start to sprout.

Nature would easily take over if the Brauns weren’t vigilant. If the grass wasn’t cut, the Brauns would start to lose space to bushes & then trees, then the things that hid in the shadows would come. Time would turn wood gray, then to dirt, anything unattended would fall apart.

The family saw nature as an adversary. It was always encroaching, threatening disintegration.

Things were difficult since their mother was killed, their lives were heavier, more about survival.

Everyone washed clothes, dishes, cleaned their own rooms, collected firewood & ran errands. They would go shopping once a week in pairs, usually led by the oldest. Mina did all this begrudgingly.

The Brauns would entertain Viktor’s clients, who frequently brought fine ingredients for the feast & they’d present their sons as possible suitors for Viktor’s daughters.

The sons would be scrubbed down, dressed up & dragged along. Viktor & the girls were picky. However, there were so many prospects.

Since the death of his wife, Viktor became increasingly rigid & obsessed with order. It was as if in being responsible for everything he thought he just had to hold on tighter. He believed everyone in the family had to do their part or else the whole thing would crumble. He was partially right.

Viktor was an accountant, a dedicated lackey of the ledgers meant lucre for his lords. Perched at his desk, feathered pen, bottle of black ink & strong cup of tea nearby most days he worked for most of the waking hours, surrounded by towering stacks of receipts, mountains of dog-eared record books & his trusty, worn abacus.

Viktor’s true love was numbers. Numbers presented a lack of pretense, mechanical obviousness, honesty. Nothing could be hidden by numbers, no surprises. Numbers didn’t lie, numbers didn’t go crazy, numbers weren’t controlled by the moon. Numbers lined up & were counted. Numbers were consistent, they had clear rules that didn’t change.

Viktor reckoned an endless succession of numbers for the transport of all manner of agricultural commodities. Viktor was one of many who worked for the Grossers Guild. He counted their money & paid attention to who owed what. The Grossers Guild turned around & funneled their various levies upwards into the pockets of Haus Patchesitzen.

His bosses were fat farmers who utilised the yearly luxuriance of the land & the people’s perpetual dependency as a way to elevate their rural stage high above & away from the sweaty, greasy lives of their rustic audience.

It was Spring. Nature was springing with life, it had a manic, thrusting, invasive energy.

That afternoon, the sun was starting to set & the singers of the song of the night were warming up for their evening performance. Mina spent those warming months wandering the woods.

Mina stumbled on a nest of infant scrags writhing in the hollow of an old rotted tree. It made a twisted, desperate silhouette against the fresh green of its surroundings.

The scrags had thin, hairless skin, bulging, blind eyes, veiny winged arms & eager mouths. They emitted little yips, advertising their total vulnerability as they jerked over each other. They eagerly anticipated their parent’s return to be fed a mouthful of regurgitated insects. Mina noted their location & ran to the woodshed to fetch a can of lamp oil.

She emptied the oil into the stump, dousing the scrags. The can sounded like a tin frog as it drained. Glug. Glug. Glug. The infant scrags continued to squirm for their food, ignoring the thick, acrid, concentrated fumes of the lamp oil & their impending doom.

Mina took a box of “Rotteufel” matches from her pocket. She took one from the devil marked box & lit it against her zipper. With a sadistic grin, she tossed it into the nest. The stump lit up & Mina backed away from the heat. The scrags whined & writhed desperately. Their little bodies popped & sizzled, soon they couldn’t be seen or heard anymore through the intensity of the flames or be heard over the crackle & roar. Mina watched with a sense of accomplishment.

Mina’s sister Frida collected insects. She was a few years older & could concentrate enough to accomplish this fastidious, moribund hobby. Mina wished she could focus on one thing like this. But there were so many steps beyond killing the bugs, she couldn’t track them all.

The lands around Braunhaus were riddled with countless varieties of insects. The bugs crawled around the forest floor, flew on the winds & swarmed in the ponds & streams.

There were waterbugs that could kill fish, there were beetles that could cut through bone, there were blood sucking flies, ticks, leeches & little mites that didn’t seem to do anything, there were moths that ate clothes, termites that ate wood, ants that got everywhere & angry hornets that ate meat, there were spiders of all sizes, some were big enough to spin webs that could catch a dog or a man.

Countless numbers of bugs were killed, yet, they only seemed to grow in number. Frida pinned the pretty ones on mattes & displayed them in bell jars. She had a desk with all her gear; the killing jar with a cake of plaster soaked in ether at the bottom, small boxes of pins, a jar of shellac & a brush, a board, multiple pairs of tweezers. Nets of different sizes were leaned in the corner.

Frida’s room was methodically decorated with thousands of pinned specimens sparkled like cut gems. Their shiny, meticulous exoskeletons betrayed their complete lack of life. It would appear like an unwholesome hobby, but the dead bugs were more like jewelry than corpses.

Frida burnt thick, oily, rose-scented incense from the Holy Order constantly to cover the musty odor of the thousands of dead creatures & the otherworldly odors of shellac & ether. She would scatter grain in the woods & plant flowers as quiet offerings to the little things.

Different seasons brought different insects. Frida’s favorites were beetles & butterflies. The beetles were most active in the Summer & Fall as they soldiered dutifully amongst the decaying leaves. The butterflies started to be a common sight in the early summer when the air was dry & the sun shone bright on everything, bringing out the colors.

Mina eagerly pestered her sister to go on a mission with her to collect beetles from the woods. The sisters were agents of death visiting their ignorant, armored prey. Frida was excited to show her sister the ropes, to initiate her further into the complexities of life, into this ghoulish guild of arthropodic execution & exhibition.

TO BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK!

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His work followed the developments of the English musical world going from Progressive Rock to Hard Rock to Punk & Heavy Metal instead of following the trends of the Art world & the continuously stale but technically & budgetarily improving Fantasy Art world.

He was instrumental into adding Punk & Metal into the gaming world, so that things weren’t just so fucking dorky. He took his work seriously as an artist, even though he found himself doing art for games instead of gallery walls.

I tried to interview John repeatedly when he was still working for Games Workshop, but he was unable to grant interviews while working for them. This interview was originally published in The defunct Black Library blog

“I distinctly remember being told what I liked was all well and good, and I had a romantic spirit, but it would never earn me a living, so there was no point in doing it.”

So speaks John Blanche. As he is now the Art Director of Games Workshop, you can’t help but think his teachers at art college might feel a little foolish now.

John’s life is a strange story almost worthy of Dickens, a writer he has a great deal of respect for (like another favourite writer of his, Mervyn Peake, he was an artist too), going from working class kid with a love of toy soldiers to some kind of artistic demiurge.

Among ‘shared’ fantasy and science fiction universes, those of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 are perhaps some of the most evocative. As an artist and director of artists, John has played a major role in shaping these worlds, or ‘alternative histories’ as he prefers to call them. Partially owing to his sensibilities, these twin game worlds have become dark and dangerous places, contrary to the glossy, High Fantasy universes favoured by US writers, populated by steel bikini-clad blondes.

Though it was the emergence of role playing games in the 1970s that helped to gave birth to Games Workshop, the men of GW were soon pushing their games away from the sub-Tolkien worlds of roleplaying. Early RPG’s were kind of the American dream writ large, cartoon versions of the frontier, where adventurous spirits could wrest vast fortunes from unfortunate Orcs by the application of a big axe, even becoming Gods if sufficient foes were felled. Not so in Warhammer and the science fantasy universe of Warhammer 40,000, places populated by flawed characters, where the only path to glory is dark and diabolical, and the gods are forever hungry.

“To me fantasy is much darker than American High Fantasy, certainly more violent, and more oppressive. But it’s also very real,” says John. “I didn’t see fantasy being occupied by shiny characters, it was all very Dickensian. Fantasy denizens to me all look like Fagin. Everybody has an eye-patch and a wooden leg, dirty fingernails, and worn clothes. And thereby lies the strength of it. It is evocative, there is so much background there, the universes are so strong.”

John explains that Games Workshop worlds are inspired a lot by the real world. Further, he maintains that the Games Workshop game worlds are extensions of Northern European culture. “History is fascinating. I constantly find that real life is far more bizarre, far weirder, than what you can conjure up with your own mind. In fact, the resonance isn’t just history, or the history of Western Europe, but it echoes through our past, right back to Paleolithic times. It’s a very Northern European thing. Skulls crop up all the time, for instance, in Northern European art. Why? These things have always fascinated me, and they find their way into my pictures. You don’t see it so much in Southern Europe. If I were better with words, I might write a book about it.”

Would Gothic be the right word?

“Yes, and no. Gothic means lots of things. You have the architectural style, from the Early Middle Ages, which then became something else in the Late Middle Ages, and was then reinvented by the Victorians, and they applied to all sorts of stuff. Then we have what we call Games Workshop Gothic, which is inspired by, but is none of these things.” The word “Gothic” itself comes from the Goths, a group of ancient Germanic tribes, which brings us neatly back to Northern Europe. John himself is a living extension of this tradition. His major influences include Rembrandt, Albrecht Dürer and Hieronymous Bosch. He even goes so far as to put altered versions of figures from their paintings into his own. “The thing is,” he says, “you carry those people with you. I’m not so excited by Bosch anymore, I don’t go out and look at his work, but it is part of me, I suppose, these days.”

The influences are there to see. For instance, John still rarely uses blue, his works executed in the earthy orange and red tones favoured by his heroes. However, his head is not only turned by the Germanic.

“The best painting I have ever seen in the flesh, and a lot of people look at me aghast when I say this, is the Mona Lisa by Da Vinci. I was astounded because I thought it was so much bigger. It’s tiny. They keep it in the Louvre, in this big box, and you have to look through bullet-proof glass at it. You have to push your way through crowds of people. But when I saw it I was transfixed, I thought, ‘;God that is incredible!’ To the same extent I like the Pre-Raphaelite Edward Burn Jones. Lawrence Alma-Tadema also. He was a very big Victorian artist, he came from Belgium, but he was actually knighted by Queen Victoria. He was one of the few foreigners to be made a Sir. And I have read accounts of them throwing away his paintings in the 1950’s because they regarded them as being purely chocolate box covers! But I’ve seen a couple. I saw one in a Hamburg museum. You stand 15 feet away and you’re looking at a photograph, and you walk up close and you’re seeing paintbrush strokes. It is emotional, painterly and textural and photographic at the same time, the guy’s a genius! But the person who really had more impact on me than anybody else has to be Rembrandt. He can do the lot. Again, he can paint almost photographically, and at other times he can be very loose and expressive.”

This conflict, and its resolution, between emotional expressionism and the painter’s craft crops up several times as John talks. In some ways, it seems to have driven his development as an artist. He says that when he was younger he was concerned mostly with photographic realism, but this has changed somewhat.

“Those painterly brush strokes express raw emotion, whereas tight controlled painting is, to some extent, just purely a visual record. To put a bit of emotion into it gives the painting lots of warmth and a dynamic that you don’t get from photographic rendering. Once I started to appreciate that in fantasy art... I mean, a person I used to dislike was Frank Frazetta. I used to think, ‘It’s just done dead quick. He’s a great artist but he just doodles them off.’ And then, one day I thought, ‘Actually, the guy’s a genius!’ After that I started to look at different things in art. I started to appreciate even some contemporary art, not all of it, because a lot of it’s awful. Rather than just look at the surface, I started to look into art and feel some of the emotional values of the artist.”

Strangely, neither seemed to be particularly favoured by his teachers at college, which just goes to show that while art is a fundamental part of human life, the people who define it as such are horribly afflicted by fashion.

“They tried to unteach me at art college. I was a working class lad from a council estate. I went to a secondary modern school, and I worked very hard to get into art college. When I arrived there it was full of quasi-intellectuals, and the big word at the time was existentialism. I didn’t know what it meant, and nobody would tell me what it meant. I wanted to draw pictures. It was just horrendous. A lot of my colleagues had unhappy experiences at art college, because the teachers tried to steer them towards what they consider to be high art, and the craft, the exercise of rendering, is frowned upon, which is just extraordinary.”

This is not something that has held back John, nor the likes of Dave Gallagher, Alex Boyd, Karl and Stefan Kopinski, or Paul Dainton, some of Games Workshop’s enormously talented artists. “That leads me to my conviction. I go to a lot of exhibitions and galleries. I don’t go to them all, but when I go to them I think there’s work that we’re producing in our studio now that can stand up alongside some of these great, great artists.”

It’s this reverence for the output of the Design Studio that has led to the creation of The Gallery at Warp Artefacts; an online repository for the very best Games Workshop artwork. The fine art prints available from The Gallery were personally selected by John and represent both a historical record of the Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 games and are a testament to the talents of the studio artists.

Still, GW’s artists are not entirely free. They can’t just make their own stuff up. They are, John says, illustrators, with deadlines to meet. But they are also one of Games Workshop’s primary engines when it comes to dreaming up new wierdnesses to unleash on the tabletop, a process that can also be seen at work in the fiction published by The Black Library. They help the worlds live, and more, they are part of what pushes their evolution forward.

“The push and shove of it is those technical restraints, but the pleasurable side of it, the organic growth side of it is trying to make our art visionary, make it lyrical, give it a narrative. That’s my personal sort of driver, not just filling spaces in a book with pictures. Recently I went to the Turner exhibition in Birmingham. I love Turner’s work, but I’d say 90-95 per cent of it was very dull. I feel I know why. Turner, like everybody else, had to earn a living, so he was doing commissions for wealthy people, classicist pictures showing their estates and their houses and the people around them. Only when Turner had the freedom to truly express himself could he let go. So I was looking at his work and thinking: ‘Hey, he’d have loved to have worked for Games Workshop!’”

John now describes himself as living in the worlds he has helped to create. His own time is spent working on sketch books, explorations of Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000. “So I have something to leave to my family. I was seriously ill a few years ago. It really was a matter of life or death. And as I lay there I thought ‘what will I leave behind?’ I’ve done loads of work but lots of it is lost, or kept in a drawer.”

Confronted with mortality, John works harder to deepen our fictional universes. A more powerful case for the lure of Warhammer you will not find. Fortunately for us, the man is a genius.

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The night was torn in half by mother’s scream. An overwhelming squirming, squeaking & scratching came from the basement.

Mina made it there first. She was four. She blinked her big green eyes hard, barely out of the warm mud of the dream world.

Her mother was spread out at the foot of the stairs, near the black, abyssal entrance to the basement. A lantern was laying on its side, casting stark shadows. Blood was all over, it dripped off the walls.

A cold wind wheezed up from the basement. Mina tried to call out, but the sound was stuck in her body. She clenched her fists, those horrible, cold feelings echoed through her body.

The sensation stuck in Mina’s heart & stomach. The noises in the basement grew louder, overpowering everything. Whatever it was, was coming closer.

Just then, Mina’s family ran in. The girls were bristling with kitchen knives, their father had an axe. This thing had a fight on its hands.

The sounds increased to an overwhelming, deafening peak & then stopped entirely. Everything was still, quiet. Nothing moved. The house was cold.

Mina’s father rushed to his wife. Her sisters huddled together. Mina tried to calm down, fearing the worst.

Mina’s father let out a cry as he held his wife’s limp body. She had been reduced to an aimless mass of mangled meat, bound into a human shape, barely bound together by tatters of clothes. Whatever killed her was frenzied, with an uncountable amount of claws.

Years passed. It was just another day. Mina was Ten. Night enveloped the Braunhaus.

In the kitchen, warm, comfortable familiarity was reduced to bulky, sinister suggestions by the veil of night. Thousands of fat-bodied, chitinous violinists played their eternal song of the darkness.

The droning, hypnotic, insectoid chant repeated steadily outside & seeped in through the cracks in the house. A rat skulked, its sinuous body slinking where the walls met the floor. Rubbing its filth, making a trail of rat grease with its brethren over the years.

The animal carried an evolutionary elegance in its evasion, an elasticity born out of countless cohort executing the same sport of survival.

Its whiskers bristled to capture even the smallest shift in the air. The rat was totally unaware it was being observed. Smelling the tiny crumbs of food people had dropped & not swept up, finding its livelihood in the carelessness of the comfortable lives of the people whose house it was.

A brick descended from above & smashed the rat’s skull. There was the crunching of bone & then nothing else, no time to even squeak.

Maybe the rat didn’t feel its loss of consciousness. Its eyes bulged out of their sockets. What used to be a recognizably rodent face was reduced to a hairy, bloody mess: a hirsute sack of gore.

Mina was smiling from cheek to cheek, her green eyes shone in the night. Few things brought her the satisfaction of ending the short lives of these vermin.

If it was small & squirmed it was fair game. It was about their intruding potential. About possibly being in the wrong place, a contrast to the order & cleanliness of the human world. Vermin would piss & shit in the corners, on the polished wood, rubbing their oils on the paint, it couldn’t be allowed. It had to be stopped.

If it had a shell, veins, too many legs, probing antennae, fur, bristles, slimy skin, vibrating whiskers, it was a target for Mina. Things that went crunch underfoot, anything that was slight & skulked was a potential target when in Mina’s predatory gaze.

The next year, Agnes, Mina’s oldest sister, was collecting vegetables for dinner from the garden. She brought back a haul noting the food was being eaten before they could get to it.

All the vegetables had tiny bites taken out of them. The Braun family garden was being eaten in the night. Viktor knew immediately who the culprits were & what to do.

Mina eagerly lined up to help with this job, knowing it would probably involve the death of whoever had the small mouths. Viktor & Mina arose well before dawn, things were quiet, not even the birds were singing their songs. Viktor & Mina got on heavy boots & jackets & Viktor prepared a lantern.

The pair crept up on the garden beds, the lantern lighting up a large circle around them. The contrast between the lit area & the darkness around them increased the fear of the unknown in the shadows. The imagination quarantined more terrors than reality. Mina held her father’s hand tightly, too focussed on the mission to chew her gum.

As they approached the garden beds Mina spotted hundreds of slimy, carapaced creatures slowly gliding along their vegetables & gasped.

“Just as I thought.” said Viktor pointing at the army of snails greedily gulping their vegetables.

The snails slipped slowly on their sparkling, glossy trails of slime. Their eyes projected on stalks surveying the plants unintelligently.

“Terrible little eating machines. I hate them!” said Mina.

Without emotion, Viktor started to collect the snails in a pile & told Mina to do the same. The snails moved so slowly they could be put in a mound & Viktor & Mina didn’t have to worry about them getting away. Soon there was an enormous mess of intertwining bodies. Mina scanned the garden, making sure no snails remained.

Viktor got a board that was the perfect size to cover the snail pile. He threw it on them & started to stomp on it, an inglorious, utilitarian dance of death.

Mina joined, jumping eagerly, smashing the snails. They died with a crunch & a release of juices. They made no sound & their demise didn’t release any psychic scar, just a mix of guts & slime on the grass that would delight the crows.

In the summer, Mina wore cut off shorts with shredded ends & an undershirt. Her mouth always bulged from chewing fat wads of gum. She would play by the creek whenever the weather permitted it, frequently when it didn’t.

One day Mina marched with accomplishment to the family manor after an afternoon outside. In those breezy, warming months, the creek was full of scrogs, especially under the bridge in the shadows where they could hide. Their eyes bulged just above the water’s surface.

The scrogs squirmed on the riverbanks, slippery, amphibious creatures with bumpy skin, short tails & dull eyes that betrayed their total lack of intelligence. Scrogs ate anything they could fit into their gaping mouths.

Mina had seen them eat mice, birds, even a kitten. They had decimated the original populations of fish & frogs that once called the creek home long ago through eating & outbreeding the competition.

Today, Mina had a roll of string & an enormous barbed needle in her sling bag & carried a spear made from an old tree branch. She wore a string of impaled Scrogs as a necklace.

The stupid, amphibious eyes of the Scrogs caught the sun as they squirmed sorrowfully. Their lives slowly drained from their fat bodies, her clothes dripping with their purple blood.

Mina’s father was terrified of this cruel agency emanating from his youngest as she stomped back to the house, dripping with the blood of scrogs. Why was she so proud?

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Not knowing what else to do, Scrott began experimenting on himself. He would alter his consciousness if he could not unlock some buried ability with the ill-gotten knowledge. At first he used the mind-altering substances he could find in the ordinary ways people found those things.

Scrott hired a battery of amoral alchemists to devise deliriants that would convert his cognition. Soon the halls of his tower were crawling with strange men to add to the assorted scum that waited on their master’s call for mayhem. It was an interesting mix.

Alchemists were a strange mix of scientist, huckster & occultist. They were all eccentric & some were louder in announcing their skills than performing them. The only way to find out was to try them.

Lord Scrott’s emissaries combed all corners of the Würstreich to find any drugs they could or even the hints of some substances that could cause altered states. They would bring these substances back & the alchemists would synthesize them in their busy laboratory.

Scrott spent all day under a blanket of these drugs, becoming more & more

detached from reality. The tower grew filthy as every piece of money he had was shifted into the creation & use of drugs.

Again & again, Lord Scrott would lie on his bed & enter the worlds of his mind. Again & again nothing would become apparent.

Finally, after consuming mushrooms cultivated from the Fungal Blight, Lord Scrott visited an immense temple that haunted the outskirts of his hallucinations.

The temple lay in a miasmal void that was both claustrophobic & infinite simultaneously. It squeezed his brain as he tried to perceive it.

Around the temple, the air was thick, perfumed, it smelled sweet, attractive like some kind of spiced meat. The temple was shaped like a skull, a bizarre skull, but a skull of something close to a human, but not human.

The temple appeared as an enormous, wrinkled skull that emerged from a pit & a bridge sprang from its mouth like a tongue. Conical forms erupted from its eye sockets, & brow. The surface was a terrible mixture of crustaceous & a plucked fowl. Swirling, colored smoke belched from all of its crevices, it created ghostly forms. A tower continued from the crown of its head. The tower had many windows that were little more than holes, arranged in patterns, they looked infected, the whole thing was topped off with a conical roof.

The temple would throb & pulsate, seeming to breathe. Scrott felt drawn to it, it called to him even when he was not intoxicated. It haunted him.

Scrott wanted to be inside the temple, but he could only circle it, see it from every angle & then it would disappear when he left the distorted world of hallucination.

Years passed & his desire to be inside the temple grew & grew. He was possessed, he had heavily detailed notebooks diagramming it, so he could think about it when he was conscious.

Eventually Lord Scrott had a drug-addled idea that seemed like the answer to his lack of magical ability. He would have spores from the highly dangerous Fungal Blight injected through his nose, into his brain. His mind would bloom & he would be able to enter the Temple.

Lord Scrott would take an overdose of Scratch in order to not feel this pain & to help transition into that realm. However, none of Scrott’s employ would perform this insane experiment & he couldn’t bring himself to do the injection while sober enough to do such a delicate maneuver.

Lord Scrott had to find someone so loyal to him as to take any command, even one that would end his life. He no longer trusted his servants so he wandered the countryside in search of someone trustworthy. He would consume enormous amounts of drugs & in a cloud of inebriation, roam the land trying to find this new partner.

One night the moon was full & the air was alive. Scrott stumbled upon a cloaked figure at a crossroads. This stranger was tall too, his face was hidden, he clinked when he walked as if his shoes were made of metal. Scrott fumbled for words, asking the stranger if he could help him. The stranger whispered “Of course, brother”.

Scrott & the stranger returned to his tower. Unseen, they entered his laboratory. Scrott ingested a large bag of the drug Scratch & as he succumbed to its narcotic effects he lay on his operating table, waiting for it to take hold fully.

“When I give the signal you must inject me through the nose, into my brain with that syringe over there.” He said, gesturing to a table of surgical implements.

Scrott’s most loyal assistant Herr Klumpfuss heard Lord Scrott talking as he walked the dark halls to use the lavatory. Surprised to hear his Lord, he knocked on the door. No one answered. He knocked again.

Again, no answer so Klumpfuss barged in the room. Lord Scrott lay on the operating table, drool pouring from his mouth, his eyes wide open, staring straight forwards, a slight smile on his face.

THE END

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DUNGEON DEGENERATES LORE DESTINED FOR THE FIRST LOWLIFE INFORMANT.

THE SELF-INFLICTED WOUND

The most painful wounds are not the ones inflicted by others, but the ones we inflict on ourselves. They are the wounds of regret, of guilt & the knowledge that we have failed to live up to our own standards.

- Das Schaf

The Valhal people faced a dilemma. Their well-worn tribal traditions offered a sense of security, an assuredness of the way the world was & what it meant to be. These were comfortable, familiar methods, old-friends.

However, the prohibited paths that they had copied from the Celestials gave them an undeniable advantage in the world & over their peers. For the first time, they felt like they could control the combative continent of Bödengärd.

With the the secrets of the Celestials, the Valhal gained an advantage over but also shut the door on the past. The tribespeople that would call themselves the Würst decided to make that faustian bargain & turned their backs on their tribal elders.

Those who opened the mystery box called themselves the Würst because it was said you are better off not knowing what they are made of. The Würst had broken the bonds with the old Gods & nature. They threw themselves into the realm of possibility, where anything could happen, & would.

The Celestials had discovered a means to cheat & use death itself, to control & subjugate nature to further their powers in life. The Würst were hungry for this potential & ignored the warnings & pleas of others.

As soon as they stepped out of line, the intellectual outsiders were targeted by their backwards brethren. The tribes would hunt down their fractured family. They painted the Würst as traitorous turncoats who had broken their most sacred taboos, messing in the ruins of the Celestials.

How could the Würst deny the discoveries they had made? Humanity is curious if anything. That same curiosity always causes trouble.

The remaining tribespeople called themselves the Gütter. They were afraid of this turn for the Würst.

The elder tribespeople believed that the Celestials had strayed so far from the natural order that they met a calimitous ending. After all, weren’t their cryptic remains all that was left of them?

The Würst took as much as they could from the ruins of the Celestials harnessed. Making use of the dead became one of the core tenants of the Würst, breaking centuries of Valhal taboo.

The next blood-soaked era; “The Self-Inflicted Wound” was horrible for the Gütter & anyone else that the Würst decided was a thorn in their side. The dead piled up as the Würst asserted themselves over their kin.

The Würst united under the leadership of the seven warrior saints. Men who rose from the ranks & showed themselves to be ready to lead this new people forward.

These warrior saints would form the Holy Order, codify the Würst historic & ideological doctrine & enforce this new way using sword, fire, torture chamber & gallows.

Crusaders of the Holy Order swarmed over the land looking for anything that might challenge the Imperial edict in any way. They killed entire villages of their tribal brethren & scoured the wilds for monsters.

This new body was declared to be the Würstreich. The Würstreich was an empire that would grind up its own people & unite them as one.

The Würstreich was headed by the first emperor Otto Die Schrecklichen, a cruel, fierce man with a curly yellow mane, a fierce countenance & a determination to dominate all the land under the Sausage Stabber banner of the Würstreich.

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Lord Scrott was a lonely man that lived in a lonely tower in the lonely foothills of the Scharf Mountains. His loneliness came from the fact that he was unpleasant, obsessive & built like a wardrobe.

The tower pierced the low-hanging mists that clung to the ground & never seemed to clear. The lands were dreary & never dried out. There were sheep, their wool smelled like moldy towels.

The tower suited Lord Scrott. The doorways were built taller than normal, he had to have things specially made to accommodate his extraordinary size.

Despite Lord Scrott easily being able to afford a chef cooking lavish meals for him, he refused to eat anything other than gruel & hard-boiled eggs as cooked by one of his lowly underlings.

Though Lord Scrott was not magically gifted, he looked & acted the part. He wore sorcerer’s robes, grew his hair long & had wild eyes.

Lord Scrott was desperate to develop control over the unseen & join the ranks of the world’s great magic users.

Lord Scrott was a noble, he had a notable ancestor at some point. Now he was just living off of that accomplishment. It was a rotten existence. Money that doesn’t move has the same effect as water that doesn’t move. Foul, smelly things grow in it.

Lord Scrott used his extreme wealth & place in society to collect many works on the occult & built up one of the largest libraries of these materials as could be found. He would attend the parties of the Würstreich’s intellectuals, even though he was known to be a bore.

Lord Scrott would send out his skulking, conniving emissaries to scour bookshops & even steal from libraries. He felt that the underhanded nature of their acquisition added to their mystique.

His stooges would sweep out from the tower, lifting up rocks, prying behind boards, snooping. They developed a nose for finding the kinds of places that magicians haunted… crossroads, lonely clearings, flea markets, strange bookstores.

His men would go so far as to kill for occult books. They would find lonely practitioners, murder them & take their books, frequently burning down their hovels.

As long as the crime didn’t come back to Scrott, his emissaries had free reign to do anything in pursuit of these books. The blood-stains on the pages were a bonus.

Lord Scrott was constantly on the alert for volumes he didn’t have. He would not only collect these musty old tomes but he read every single one of them. Even the most impenetrable.

Lord Scrott would sit in his extra large wingback chair that overlooked the rolling hills of the Highlands with a stack of books & read for hours. He would take notes, he had almost as many notebooks as he had books to study.

Lord Scrott believed that to crack the magic code he had to absorb & understand enough knowledge. With this understanding he would be able to use some of the hidden powers he knew existed beyond the wall of the mundane.

With his mind spilling occult knowledge, he was no closer to any kind of arcane power. Instead he felt like a librarian & a professor, like he should be traipsing the halls of places of learning. However, what he really wanted was to be a practitioner.

Hopeless, Scrott worked with the Imperial clerical establishment known as the Holy Order. The Order claimed that all magic was corrupting & they enforced this with sword, fire & the terrible tools of torture.

Lord Scrott helped the Holy Order to find & capture magic users. The Order’s inquisitors would corner the poor magicians that Scrott’s minions had already stolen books from & descend on them like vultures to a corpse.

The magicians would rarely fight back. They practiced magic because they were bodily lacking.

The inquisitors would take the wizards, chained & squirming in their black inquisitor wagons led by black, bovine Büffel, through the lonely, winding roads that lead to Scrott’s tower.

Scrott would personally oversee their torture in order to make sure to collect their occult secrets. Lord Scrott’s scribes would furiously take notes before the agonized acolytes were hauled away to never be seen again.

Even with his personal graveyard bloating with an ever-growing number of the corpses of wizards, witches, warlocks, sorcerers, alchemists & shamans & his library having stacks of books spill onto the floor Lord Scrott was no closer to this talent. He was desperate, beyond desperate.

CONTINUED SOON!

However, this medium is still young enough & changing all the time, so this kind of assessment is necessary. This self awareness is probably needed no matter how old you are. As long as the self-consciousness doesn’t turn into paralysis.

The point is to define who we are, what we’re doing & where we came from. This is something that must be repeated because if it is not repeated, it will be forgotten.

In working on LowLife, I’ve been thinking a lot about what the point of role playing is, what makes it fun, how it relates to all the advances in video games & what that means for the genre.

I wasn’t a rules person but, through a lot of talk therapy & playing Magic, the Gathering with my family, I’ve broken through barriers that developed when I was a teenager & have accepted that I can both learn & create rules.

If we dig into the past, Role Playing Games grew out of Wargaming & as the medium has gotten older, the wargame elements have seemed/become way less important & the actual role play elements have increased in significance. From there I think about why role playing is so important in some people’s lives.

I came to understand role playing as a shared imaginative story with rules to give it some structure, so that the shared experience makes sense for everybody. The point of this is to bring people together, share stories & have fun. Role playing is a game form of improvisational theatre, imagination with rules.

Instead of acting in the physical space, the action takes place in your mind, in books & on scraps of paper with dice used to randomize results. You can use maps & miniatures as aids in visualizing what’s going on, but we never did.

The miniatures were separate, totemic objects to have around your room & remind you of the rich world of imagination that contrasted with dull reality. These weren’t game pieces, they were magic items.

As a kid I was attracted to D&D specifically, because I love swords, sorcery & monsters. I was beyond intrigued by the idea of a game that you play in your mind, using books, dice & paper. It seemed like something magical, the unreal becoming real.

At this point role playing games are old hat (50+ years, the same age as Punk. Two major forces in my life). Role Playing is an oral tradition & a present-day incarnation of something people did around the campfire thousands of years ago.

Computer RPGs, card games & board games have all absorbed & evolved so many of the early mechanics of RPGS. All of this development has made clear the central reasons to roleplay; to explore in a low-stakes environment & have social, dramatic & storytelling potential.

The strength of your imagination is central. We aid in this by presenting as strong of a theme as possible & mechanics that are fun, engaging & don’t feel like button-mashing or homework.

It is because of these factors that LowLife emphasizes the story & theme, while all mechanical aspects are to be fun, in the background & not distract from the yarn being spun.

For me, the central motivation is in sharing this world. Being immersed is of primary importance. Everything else is secondary to being dunked in the rich world of DUNGEON DEGENERATES.

When I was living in Eugene, Oregon I realized that each piece of art I produced was a magic spell. These pieces were a concentration of my will, projected out into the world. I started to see my art becoming real. This changed my long game.

My art has always been about augmenting reality. Since expanding my output into gaming, anyone can play, roll around & be part of it.

I can’t thank John Blanche & Games Workshop enough for making it clear that these game worlds can be art. Like Soviet Constructivism emphasizes, it is art into life. Games Workshop was the best at it in the late 80s.

I like the “art into life” approach because it gives art a purpose beyond just existing. Being useful is very important. Art, while being very important for people, is something that’s constantly in the background. It being focussed on is a recent development.

As a hobby, this emphasis on art & the inclusion of the idea of role playing being a form of gamed improvisational theatre brings these things into people’s lives & increases their importance. It’s with that, that I am going into this project.

X SEAN

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