A BP&G adventure - Pockets; Heretic

[joegoda]

From a hidden spot along the Market wall, Beegle saw that failure was imminent. He watched as Bags and Briggs dispatched the last of his brigands, aided by an older man who he did not know. His frustration, his anger was boundless. How could his army have been so defeated, and defeated so quickly by so few. From what he had seen, Bags had only a handful of ragtag men, some not even carrying a weapon. And the worst part of it all is that Bags men suffered hardly more than flesh wounds, while his men lay on the ground dying like ants stamped out at a picnic!

Fastening his eyes on his hated foe, Beegle slipped out of his hiding space and worked his way along the wall towards the entry way. If he could escape once and build an army, he could do it again, and this time he would come back with a hundred, no... Two hundred men!

That stupid Pewitt wasn't even here, claiming he was going out to take care of that pipsqueak Pockets. Well, that was hours ago, even before the sun had come up and the battle here was lost. And where was the magic man? Nowhere to be found. Useless. Absolutely useless.

But what if even two hundred men weren't enough? What if Bags came up with some other scheme, some other trick, and defeated two hundred men. He had defeated the assassins of Bangala, and he had done it without drawing any blood at all! Absolute insanity.

"Well," thought Beegle, from a spot behind a straw filled wagon, "erm. I suppose it's a job I will have to do myself."

He drew his dagger, a jeweled encrusted dagger given to him by one of his army when the man had recognized Beegle's obvious superiority. Of course, the recognition had come at the cost of the other man's life, but that mattered little. In the end, it was Beegle who had been standing and the other had been dead.

The dagger had superb balance and Beegle had spent many hours practicing throwing it. His aim was precise and deadly, and he could clip the wings off of a fly at twenty paces. This was not an idle bit of braggadocio. He had demonstrated his skill many times to his rag tag bunch, as way of showing who should be boss and who could be dead. There were a great many flies who had perished without wings due to Beegle's skill.

His practice may also have been his undoing, because just as he was about to let the evil sharpness fly from his hands to find a new home in the ribcage of Bags, a winged black mote flew up Beegle's nose. The fly may have been a relative, seeking revenge.

Well, this would cause consternation to anyone, not just a maddened monster like Beegle. The jeweled blade, its trajectory disturbed by its owner having a fly up his nose, flashed across the space between Beegle and Bags, and rather than bury itself into soft flesh, it bounced harmlessly off hardened copper and leather.

Bags, Briggs and Hawk turned as one, seeking the owner of the deadly dagger. Their eyes fell upon Beegle, who was furiously slapping at his face and sneezing violently. The scene was so incredibly funny that the three men couldn't help themselves and started laughing.

One of the men near the gate, a circus weightlifter named Gregg, saw what had happened. He spied Beegle nearing the gate. Gregg picked up a chunk of granite the size of a breadbox and threw it at the retreating Beegle, crying out in fury as he did so.

The rocky missile was true to its mark, catching Beegle right above his shoulders, and removing anything that was above them. Beegle's body, headless, fell to the ground, shuddered briefly, and was still.

"Who did that?" Bags cried out, no longer laughing. He looked around at his eleven men, accusingly. "Come on, out with it! I'm not going to fire you or anything like that. But it would have been nice to capture the bastard alive."

Nobody would admit to the deed, but Gregg looked suspiciously sheepish, and Bags walked over to him and through an arm, companion-like, around Gregg's massive shoulders. "You know," Bags said loudly, "it was probably just as well. He wouldn't have lasted more than a night in jail. Some sort of accident, like this, was bound to happen."

This caused all the men to laugh and cheer their leader, and they all started chanting "Bags! Bags!" over an over.

The chanting brought the townsfolk, who had been kept prisoner inside the walls of their own kingdom, creeping and slinking out from their houses and hovels to see what all the noise was about. Seeing that all of Beegle's men were dead or very wounded, a cheer went up, hailing the heroes. The chant of "Bags! Bags!" grew even louder.

Bags, seeing that he ought to, even though he would rather not, say something, climbed upon a stack of hay bales and raised his hands for silence. When the noise had finally died down, he began.

"Beegle is dead!" he said. This alone brought another round of cheers and chanting until Bags rose his hands, asking for quiet again. "It will be a long road to get this place back to the way it was," he said. "And I want you to know I won't forget why I left in the first place." There was a general murmur among the assembly. "Some of you were awful quick to condemn my friend Pockets, thinking he was some sort of demon just because he was a bit... odd."

"Well," an anonymous speaker said, "He was, you know!"

Bag was silent and he glared at the speaker. After an inward count of ten, or maybe fifty, he began again. "Pockets wasn't a demon," he said quietly and most importantly, with deadly sincerity. "Pockets was... is... different. He has gone through more crap and suffered more pain because of his difference than any of you will ever know." Bags took a deep breath. "Did you know he died once, just to make sure all of your miserable lives would continue just as it had been? Did you?"

Nobody said a word, but a palpable feeling of shame rose from the crowd.

"Did you know," Bags continued, "that he was once captured by a mad wizard and forced into slavery, learning things that none of you could even begin to understand? Did you know that he and I were both orphans, and more than once he saved my life because he was different? Because he doesn't think like you or me and never will?"

Bags scanned the crowd for a familiar face. "Where's Damian? The guy that runs Swinehart's?"

A woman near the front of the crowd said, "Damien's gone, your majesty. Killed by one of his barmaids when she thought he had cheated her out of pay."

"Dead?" Bags frowned. "Well, crap. Who runs Swinehart's now? Anybody?"

Nobody spoke up for a while, and then a balding man near Bags said, "Beegle shut the place down. Said it was a place of... umm..."

"Decadence," someone prompted.

"Yeah," the bald man said. "Decadence. Said he shut it down for our own good."

"No Swinehart's?" Bags was silent. "Well, that's the first thing that has to change. I need a beer, now." Remember what he was talking about, his face took on a glower again. "The point is that Pockets, for all of his oddity, made your lives better. He created that refrigy thing that kept beer and ale cold at Swinehart's. Any farmers here?"

A few raised their hands.

"And didn't he create something that helped you do something with your crops? Make it grow faster or make it easier to harvest or something?"

The farmers in the group nodded and muttered agreement.

"So, how dare you accuse him of being evil!" Bags' voice rose again. "How dare you! When he did nothing but live his live in his little work shed, alone, and invented things to make your lives easier! How dare you!"

A tall woman stepped forward. "Your majesty! We were under a spell, a... glamour, from the Green Preacher! He promised us..."

"Promised you!" Bags roared in anger. "Don't tell me in one breath that you were under a spell and then in the next that you believed promises told to you by that green bastard! I could have believed you were under a spell. I don't, but I could have. I think you were lured by promises that your life would be grander, bigger, and richer than it was. I think you believed that you wouldn't have to work any more and were perfectly willing to hang Pockets, who never did any of you any harm, out to dry, just for your own petty wants."

"It wasn't all of us, your majesty!" A short, round man stepped forward. "Some of us spoke out against the Preacher!"

"Yeah, sure," Bags retorted, snorting as he did. "But after you spoke out, you did nothing. Nothing! All it takes for evil to take root is for good men, like you, to do nothing!" Bags spat on the ground below and bent to sit on the top bale of hay. "I don't think I want to be your king," he said quietly. "I really, really don't. I think I liked it better when I as exiled."

"Well, mister Timothy Bags, I didn't." A familiar voice from the back drew Bags attention. An old woman, stooped and bent, using a long walking stick for a cane came forward. She shuffled through the crowd, which parted before her like a river around a barge. When she reached the bales of hay, she thumped her walking stick on the ground once, hard.

"Bejay," Bags said. Bejay was the unofficial leader of the dregs of Tears society, who lived in the run down and fairly abandoned part of the kingdom. He and she had forged a tentative alliance during his first run in with Beegle.

"Yeah," she said. "It's me. Beegle left me and the gang pretty much to ourselves." She chuckled. "I guess he was too dainty for us." She thumped her stick on the ground again. "But you! You promised me that you would always be around, remember? And at the first sight of trouble, you bug out!"

"Bejay," Bags protested, "he was trying to kill me! Kill my family!"

"Oh, fine," she said and spat on the ground. "Like that's the first time someone has tried to kill you." She spat on the ground again. "Running to ground like a rabbit. And the moment you leave, the whole place goes to hell!" She cast a gray eye up to where Bags sat. "What does that tell you, sonny?"

Bags, his anger drenched by Bejay's, shrugged. "I dunno, Bejay. What should it tell me?"

"By god and goddess, Bags!" Now it was a Bejay's voice yelling. "It should tell you that this pack of people," she swung her stick around to indicate the crowd around her, "are like a bunch of children! You're like their damned daddy, you damned idiot, and Grizelda is like their damned mommy! So they picked on your friend, called him names. So what? They were scared of him, Bags! What do you expect? He never really came out of his little hidey-hole, never really got to know anybody here. He just stayed in his little shed and kept to himself, being all weird and godlike. To these morons, it was easy to believe he was a demon. It was easy to believe he could never be one of them. He never tried."

Bejay squinted an eye up at Bags. "And now the bad guy is dead." She pointed her stick over at the dead body of Beegle. "I kinda think that Preacher guy is dead too, if that big green ball of light I saw earlier means anything. So what are you gonna do now, Mister Bags, your majesty?" She turned slowly around in a circle, looking at the crowd gathered around her. "You have a buncha kids here, waiting for their daddy to come home." When her circle was complete, she was looking up at Bags again. "So? What are you gonna do?"

Bags sat silently on the bales of hay and scratched absently at his shaggy beard. Eventually he said, "I think, Bejay, that I will have a beer. I have a kingdom to rebuild, and I need fortification." Catching Briggs eye, he called out, "Briggs! You think you can get Swinehart's open and running?"

Briggs made his way though the crowd, followed by Hawk. "Oh," he said, smiling, "I don't think it will much trouble atall, your majesty. Remember Jeeves? Your scribe?" Bags nodded. "Before Beegle shut the place down, Jeeves was becoming quite the barkeep, since nobody else took the job after Sarah killed Damien."

"Good!" Bags jumped down from the hay. "Let's get this party started." He took Hawk's elbow. "C'mon, Hawk. Let me show you how to run a kingdom."

A stick thumped against Bags' chest. "Hawk?" Bejay stepped between the two men and gave a scanning gaze over the older man. "Hawk, as in Weehawk?"

"I'm not so wee any more, ma'am," Hawk said, smiling politely.

"You don't know me, do you boy?" Bejay laid a hand on Hawks chest.

"No ma'am," Hawk answered.

"Bejay," Bags explained, "he's lost his memory."

Bejay turned her gaze to Bags. "Lost his memory, huh? Well, maybe that's for the best. His childhood wasn't the easiest."

Hawk started, and his head jerked back an inch. "You knew me as a child?" he asked, surprised.

"Sonny," Bejay said, "I'm your mother."

Bags eyes rolled. "This day just gets stranger and stranger." He pointed at a member of his army. "You... um... Charles? Chuck?"

"Henry, your majesty," Henry said.

"Yeah, Henry. Go out and let Griz know it's okay to come in, okay? Tell her I kept my promise to her, she'll know what I mean."

"Yes your majesty. Right away." Henry took off for the front gate at a run.

"Now," Bags said, "let's say we have this little family reunion where I can clear my head a bit? It's been a heck of a day." He started up the road to where the pub, Swinehart's stood. "Oh, and if anyone can find Pockets, that will be a good thing. Send him my way, will you?"