Establishing Black Claw

  Waking up and getting dressed, Glitch saw through the window that the sun was high in the sky. He sensed his companions outside and Steve asleep in one of the other rooms. Walking outside he saw three guards in front of the house, a group of young children across the street, and a table full of food and drinks set up on the porch. Asking one of the guards what it was, he was told the townsfolk had set it up as a thank you. Grabbing a sandwich and pouring himself what he assumed was orange juice, he told the guards to help themselves to the food as well.

  “Sassy, everything ok?” Glitch asked as he rounded the house to the attached covered area where he assumed Boris had spent the night.

  “Yes, honored servant.”

  “Good morning everyone. I need to go find Captain Jean and we’re going to do some public relations work on our way.”

  “What do you mean public relations work?” Leo asked.

  “You guys are going to let some kids ride on your backs. It will make us seem less intimidating and help the townsfolk accept us. Think of it as a different kind of stealth.” Glitch said with a smile. “Sassy, why don’t you come meet the kids. I’ll call for the rest of you in a minute.” and he and Sassy headed back to the guards out front. Glitch waved the kids over offering them food from the table and Sassy rubbed against the kids legs and only complained when a little girl clumsily picked her up.

  “Would you kids like to meet my other friends?” Glitch asked. Seeing nods in return he had the rest of the companions come out. Seeing the kids step back in fear he had his companions lay down in the front yard. He then signaled for the nearest guard to come with him and introduced the guard to each of the gang. He then called the kids over to meet the big scary beasts that had sniffed the guards hand before allowing him to pet them.

  Once he saw the kids had relaxed and were petting the animals Glitch asked, “I’m going to go get Steve, then we’ll go see Captain Jean. Who wants to ride around town on one of my friends?” He met eyes with one of the guards and who nodded in understanding and began getting the children mounted. While Glitch woke Steve and loaded his inventory up with some more food.

  “Bandit, let the wolves know we should be leaving town in an hour.”

  The guards walked with Glitch and informed him that Captain Jean was in the Town Hall with the Council. Located on the next block behind the market area at the main gate, it was a short walk. “Rides over, kids.” Glitch announced to the expected disappointment as the guards helped them down.

  Glitch stepped up the steps and turned to address the crowd. “As you know the Alliance of Anarchy in this town has either surrendered to the guards or been eliminated. I will head out shortly to hunt down the remainder of the alliance. Outside the main gate you will see a very large tree. That tree is an extension of the Grove. The grove has a guardian which is by far the most powerful being on our planet. He is an integration specialist and will answer any questions you have about the System. When I return to the town I will make more time to answer your questions and we will establish the leadership of this town that will be responsible for securing the town, developing training systems to help you grow in strength and advance your classes, and we’ll start building the foundation for crafting and trade networks we will need for humanity to overcome the increasing dangers we will face in the future. If there are any casters with area of effect skills, I would appreciate it if you would wait a few minutes here for me.” Glitch turned and headed inside through a door that a guard held open for him.

  Inside he was directed to a meeting room. “Sorry for interrupting.” Glitch said while entering. “Captain Jean, have the decisions been made on the status of the alliance prisoners?”

  “Yes. Six have agreed to pay a fine and leave once their gear has been returned to them. I felt it was best to hold them until you return.”

  “Good call. Sorry, I was a little worn out last night.”

  “Understandable. The remainder will be paroled to serve two hundred hours of community service and allowed to stay in the community.”

  “Sounds Great. Now as the interim town council, I will shoulder you with the burden of deciding how the town’s leadership will be determined. I will take control of the town before leaving. I assume this building has some sort of city management controls?”

  “There is a pedestal in the lord’s office.” One of the council members answered.

  “Great, I will need someone to guide me to it in a second. I will then head out to finish off the remaining alliance. While I am gone, start roughing out a plan for the security of the city, another to establish training and education open to all residents geared towards helping them raise their stats and skills, and a third plan for developing a crafting and trade network. This world will continue to get more dangerous and we need to be strong if humanity is going to survive. Outside the gate you will find an enormous tree. At this tree, you can communicate with Grove, an integration specialist who will answer any questions you have regarding the system. I recommend a delegation from the council seek out advice on city planning from Grove while the remainder of you coordinate with a responsible representative of each of the various classes and professions to gather info from Grove on how to advance their strength and abilities.”

  “I also advise you to find someone with role playing games and real time strategy games experience to advise the council or be a member of it. I will also need a trustworthy merchant to meet me at the gate when I leave and a small group of guards to secure the loot the wolves and I will consign to said merchant. Now who can show me to the Lord’s office?”

  “Pierre can show you to the office and is also the merchant I would recommend using for your consignments.” Captain Jean motioned to a stout man who gave the captain a stern look before standing and moving to the door.

  “This way sir.” Pierre said as he opened the door. As they walked Pierre turned to Glitch and said, “Sir, I feel it would be more appropriate to have other merchants who are not on the council handle the selling of your consignment.”

  “You being the kind of person to mention that is probably why Captain Jean was so quick to recommend you. In the future, we will look for a fairer way to handle stuff like this. For now, don’t worry. You will not be getting wealthy off of this deal. You will sell the goods we give you at a very fair price to those that can use them and on credit when necessary. I expect you to keep a small profit for yourself, but the most important goal is to upgrade the gear of those that need it. Guards can have anything they need for free from my consignment, but they will have to pay for the wolves stuff.. Here is 20,000 credits to buy up any non-magical armor and weapons that you can.” Glitch said while entering his inventory and transferring credits to Pierre.

  Glitch moved into the office leaving a stunned Pierre behind for a second. Spotting the pedestal, Glitch added the town to his “Multi-Planar Empire”, designated it as the capital, and paused for a second before he renamed it as Black Claw. “I renamed the town Black Claw for branding reasons. It will make more sense when I establish my guild and build an army. If you can find an artist to design us a logo, I’d appreciate it. Now I’ve got to get going, if you don’t mind following me to the gate.”

  Pierre paused and appeared to be reading an announcement. “Black Claw…Planar Empire. Big plans?”

  “Only to save as many humans as possible and prevent us all from being enslaved at the end of this integration.” Exiting the town hall, Glitch saw ten people in robes, the twins, Steven, and his companions waiting on them. “Ok, casters. I’m looking for people with indirect area of effect spells for this mission. Things like blizzard, lightning storm, fire rain, etc. If you do not have a spell like that, please excuse yourselves.” Two people left. “This is a volunteer only mission to take out the remainder of the alliance of anarchy. Your roles will be to dump all your spells from a covered and concealed position and my team will take care of the rest. If you don’t wish to volunteer you may leave.” No one else left. “The Alliance wasn’t very popular were they.” He said getting a chuckle from some of the casters.

  “Can anyone make a guess at how much it would cost to get enough wood to cover four 4 foot by 6 foot holes?”

  “My brother is a woodcutter, sir. I’d guess around 50 credits.” a young man answered.

  “Here’s 200. Buy as much as you can carry in your inventories and meet me at the gate as soon as you can. Remember that wood will be protecting your heads if they get off any spells.” Glitch then turned to his gang. “Ladies and Steve, I would like you to join me on this mission if you don’t mind.” Steve nodded and Kaitlyn admitted with a smile, “I guess we can put up with you a little longer.”

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  “I knew the muscles would help you make up your mind.” Glitch retorted as he led everyone to the gate. Once there, he headed over to John and a group of guards he assumed were waiting for him. “John, I’m consigning some gear for Pierre to sell. Can you help secure it and move it to his storage location? And spread the word that guards can have anything from my consignment that they need for free? I’m going to have the wolves drop what they want to consign outside the gate if you can help Pierre with that also. Guards will have to pay for items from the wolves’ consignment. Everybody, drop all the loot you’re carrying over there. Bandit…”

  “Already on it. They were waiting just outside the gate.” Bandit said as some of the guards at the gate looked out and jumped a little when 40 wolves suddenly appeared and began dropping loot on the ground. Pierre went through the gate and began gathering the wolves' loot while 2 guards remained by the piles inside the gate.

  The group was making small talk when John approached once again. “Glitch, I would like to accompany you on this mission. I’ve already cleared it with Captain Jean.”

  “I’m fine with that John.” Glitch said while pulling out a sandwich. When the casters approached, he told them, “Grab whatever you think you can use from those piles over there.” The young man from earlier returned 80 credits to Glitch receiving a nod in return.

  Ambush

  As the wolves headed to the southwest, reconning for the alliance members, Glitch headed over to the new Grove extension. “Hey Grove, you there?”

  “Yes.” Grove appeared on the tree.

  “We’re heading out to track down the rest of the alliance members. Should be back late tomorrow. You will probably get a lot of visitors here shortly. Try to help them as much as you can.”

  “Will do. Good luck.”

  A couple of hours later, Glitch found what he thought was a perfect spot. The road turned then dropped down into some low ground with a cliff on the outside and a gently sloping rise to the inside of the curve. Glitch moved the group into the woodline a couple hundred meters before the curve and explained his plan after the obligatory, “holy shit that’s a lot of stats” when he added the 3 lowest leveled casters to his party.

  Scratching out 4 L shapes about 15 meters apart about 40 meters from the road after laying down and confirming they could still see the area he designated as a kill zone. “10 wolves will move forward and get eyes on the alliance, they should have received the notification that they lost the city and will be moving this way. We’ll place the casters in the fighting positions that we’ll dig. When you see Grayson’s head explode, dump all your mana you can in aoe spells. Position 1 will place their spells between the front of the formation and the middle. Positions 2 and 3 will drop your spells dead center. Position four will position your spells between the middle and the end. Once you’re done, stay quiet in your holes until I call you out. The wolves will prevent anybody from escaping out either end and my companions and I will clean up anything that’s left. John, Kaitlyn, Ashley, and Steve will secure the entrances to the fighting positions. Any questions?” No one had any. “Boris, hole 1. Make it about this deep,” he said holding his hand chin high on the shortest caster. “I’ll get hole 2. Bandit start working on hole 3. Leo and Tonya hole 4. Casters get your multi-form tools out and start gathering camouflage from behind the positions. Drop your lumber here before taking off. Sassy, keep an eye on them.”

  The holes were finished in about 30 mins with Boris proving himself to be a digging machine. Glitch called over the casters and showed them how to place the wood over the fighting positions, level the excess dirt on top of and to the front, rear, and sides of the positions. Once the positions were to his standard, he had the casters camouflage the positions and he stealthed down to the road and returned to add some more here and take a little away on each so they blended into the hillside behind them.

  After handing out sandwiches for everyone, he told the casters to get into the holes and he and the companions moved into position closer to the road. And waited, and waited, and waited. About 3 hours later, Bandit let him know the alliance had been found on the road moving his direction about 2 hours out. He spread the word and everybody settled in to wait some more. An hour later, he made a final check that everyone was in position and ready then settled down to wait for guidance from the wolves.

  Bandit let him know when the group was about to enter the killzone. Squinting his eyes, he triggered his aiming abilities and began charging an iron bolt. The alliance had no security out and were in a strung out group following behind the tanks. None of them were even looking around much besides the occasional casual glance. Focusing in on the gaggle in the middle of the formation he spotted Grayson wearing a red striped jacket over his armor and focused his aim on the center of his face.

  As soon as Grayson had reached the center of Glitch’s killzone, he fired and then began casting Blizzard, fire storm, and lightning storm while picking his next target. The entire formation of alliance members was getting blasted with ice, fire, lightning, and wind before Glitch fired his second iron bolt at the largest tank. Two people escaped out the back of the formation, but were killed by the wolves before they got to the turn in the road. The entire party was down before Glitch took a third shot.

  Waiting 30 seconds Glitch observed the killzone for signs of movement then he and his team stealthed down to loot and check for survivors. After they finished searching the killzone, the team moved back up to the prepared positions and gathered up the casters to head back to town. The place was kept slow and as quiet as possible as they moved through the woodline for a couple miles before moving back down to the road.

  A few minutes after they started walking on the road, Glitch moved to Steve, John, Kaitlyn, and Ashley and said, “I know that wasn’t the most exciting mission for you guys, but I wanted to let you know the roles you played were important. I still have very little idea what kind of abilities humans have adapted. In case someone was stealthy enough to get past the wolves, your presence would have given us enough time to react.”

  “If they got past the wolves, how would we have helped?” Ashley asked. “Not like we could have spotted them.”

  “Probably not, but your deaths would have been loud enough for us to react.”

  “So you put us there so our deaths would keep the mission from failing?” a shocked Kaitlyn asked.

  “Yep. But I would have resurrected you.” Glitch said with a smile. “Except maybe Steve, I’m still not sure about him.”

  “What?” Steve said, before he could stop himself, still not certain of his status or comfortable with the group.

  “Just kidding Steve. If I’m right and our future includes dungeons and sneaky spy movie missions, I’m going to want a thief in my group if you want to stick around some more. I suspect it’s hard to find a thief that can be left on their own to gather loot.”

  “But you had the Tiger watching him.” John said. “Not that he was a problem or anything before the alliance had us lock him up.”

  “The tiger didn’t watch me. I saw her tracks leave with you.” Steve said.

  “Yeah, her stealth is not high enough to not leave tracks.” Glitch explained.

  “But that Polar bear doesn’t so there was no way in hell I was going to try anything.” Steve said. Getting a chuckle from both John and Glitch.

  “Minus two for trustworthiness. Plus five to intelligence.” Glitch got chuckles from even the twins who were struggling a little with someone taking their potential deaths so casually. “So guys, can you give me and the twins a few minutes? I put some points into charisma and I’m going to try and convince them I’m a kind, sweet, caring hunk of manly manhood.”

  “Who casually puts them into a position where their loud deaths would serve as early warning?” John said as he tapped Steve on the shoulder and moved forward.

  Giving John and Steve time to move ahead, Glitch walked along with the twins who kept looking back and forth from him to each other seemingly unsure of what was coming. “I know you haven’t had much time, but I wanted to remind you to think about what you wanted for the future and if you want to stay as part of my team moving forward.”

  “Are options are pretty limited right now, so we were hoping to stay with you for a while. We just don’t know what we can do” Both girls nodded.

  “Thank god. I was worried I was going to have to keep dumping all my unassigned stats into charisma to get you two to stay with me until you were strong enough to be safe doing anything you wanted. As far as what you can do, it will be whatever you find you want to do. I’ve got a couple ideas, what we could use two young ladies with incredibly high charisma for.”

  “Like what?” Ashley asked.

  “Well for starters, how hard do you think it would be for someone like you to get information out of people as a spy? Or who would suspect one of you to be a super sneaky assassin? But really, it all comes down to what you want to do.”

  “Oh.” Ashley exclaimed. “You know there aren’t many men that would look at us and the first thing they thought is, ‘Wow. They’d make great assassins.’”

  “I never said it was the first thing that came to mind, but if we have a chance of saving humanity, I’m going to need a lot of help. I’m going to be in Black Claw for a week or so. I’ll drag you along into some meetings, help you start training stealth, and to try a few other things, but you’re going to have some time to try different things and think about what you want to be. If in the end you decide you want to open a lingerie store, I’ll make sure you can…as long as you model the products for my approval.” Glitch said, giving them his patented dirty old man eyebrow wiggle.

  Rolling her eyes, Kaitlyn said, ”I saw you changed the town name to Black Claw. Why?”

  “It’s going to be a branding thing. Eventually I’ll have an adventuring slash crafting slash trading guild and an army. I want us to have a reputation of ‘Black Claw will treat you fairly, but you definitely don’t fuck with them.’”

  “You definitely don’t think small.” Ashley said.

  “Well, you don’t get made Multi-Planar Emperor by thinking small.”

  “I thought that was an error in your file?” Ashley replied.

  “Hush now. I earned my titles the old fashioned way.”

  “Yeah, by being integrated into them.” Kaitlin finished for him.

  “Fine if that’s the way you're going to be, I’ll just go hang out with people that appreciate me.” Glitch stuck his nose in the air and stomped away towards the boys doing his best petulant five year old stomping away impersonation.

  “So, are they staying with you?” John asked as Glitch caught up with them.

  “For now. I’m trying to encourage them to try lots of different things to figure out what they want to become. Hopefully, I can get them to put up with me until they are too badass for me to need to worry about them when they leave.”

  After a thoughtful second John said, “I’d like to stay.”

  “Steve, why don’t you go see if you can have better luck with the girls than I did.” When Steve practically sprinted away, Glitch had to ask, “Did he seem a little too eager to follow that command?”

  “Can you blame him?”

  “So, are you wanting to stay because of the girls?”

  “Mostly, but probably not the way you think. I was instantly stuck in the deep end of the friend zone as soon as I met them. I…I just think you are going to be doing a lot of interesting things and hanging out with you will definitely give me plenty of opportunities to make something of myself.”

  “Okay. First thing you’ll need to do is get your stealth up. I’ll be working with the girls on that, so I don’t think you and drooling boy back there would mind joining us. Next we’ll have to figure out a way to get you some ranged attacks. And you can secretly convince Captain Jean that having a spy with me would be a good idea.”

  “He may be a little ahead of you on that one.”

  “So the crayons haven’t completely rotted his brain. Just to be clear, I’m okay with you reporting everything. Lord knows, I need all the help I can get to keep from glitching things up.”

  “Glitching things up?”

  “Forget I said that.” Suddenly getting very serious. Glitch said, “And one other thing, John.”

  Taken back a little by Glitch’s tone, “What’s that?”

  “We murder anything that tries to hurt those girls.” Glitch said darkly as Boris appeared to the side to give them a nod and Sassy popped in to rub against Glitch’s legs.