Witness

My senses gradually return to me; that wholly typical, sweaty, dry mouth feeling that I’ve been accustomed to from my years of functioning alcoholism. Fighting back my drowsiness, I peel my eyes open to see a tankard of water on the wooden drawer beside my bed. It’s frosty, an oozing crystalline vapor surrounding its body, with a sudden break in the vapor above it, which as I understand means it’s a magically cooled mug. A few icy chugs later and I’m mostly functional. Leia is gone. From the orange sunlight filtering through the window, it’s evening time.

The reason I awoke immediately becomes clear to me. The floor is vibrating. Not violently, but at a very peculiar pitch and hum, almost like an old air conditioner. It seems to be coming from outside. I peek through the window drapes to take a look. A cobblestone street, rather rustic and mottled, with solid concrete-like sidewalks wide enough for a cart. It’s filled with people, many of which aren’t human, but all are dressed in the bare minimum of sack-cloth style coverings, and they’re hurriedly speed-walking all in one direction, away from the noise. As the throngs of people filter out, the last few of them are running, and the hum is growing louder.

I reflexively grab my pistol from its holster, keeping it low and out of sight from the window. At once comes a neatly ordered line of what appear to be knights in a sort of mixed leather and steel armor, holding long polearms with a curved blade atop them. They’re marching in lockstep, and immediately behind them is a row of magicians holding staffs, robed in black. The humming is rattling the window now.

The magicians are actively casting some sort of magic, chanting the entire way. Beneath their feet, I see a perfect, glass-like layer of ice forming behind them in a uniform line. A second layer of frosty, plush snow forms over it, a few inches deep. Flanked on both sides from this procession is a series of floating, black-as-night ethereal beings, holding black, metal staffs and consumed entirely in a miasma that obscures their shape and form. I can vaguely make out that they’re cross-legged, in a sitting position, floating along while matching the speed of the procession. One turns to look at me, and I see its eyes. Red, piercing, tiny lights. It turns away.

By this point the humming is starting to hurt my eyeballs; my mostly-empty tankard is skidding around on the nightstand. The main focus of the procession has arrived. I see an open-top carriage come into view; more of a sled, than a carriage. It has no wheels, it’s being suspended in the air by some kind of magic. Atop the carriage is… a slime?

A giant, gelatinous mass, clear in some places, colored a pale blue in others, filling up the entirety of this luxury floating bathtub of a conveyance. Atop its head is one of those medieval silken poofy hats, like a loofah, or maybe a beret, bright red in color. A sword, trimmed in silver, is rotating end-over-end mid-air in front of him. There’s no discernible facial features, just a blob, despite the hat. Another row of magicians, and then knights, follows the carriage. As this rearmost line of magicians walks, the plush ice and snow layer vanishes, leaving a perfectly clean cobblestone surface – which then is hit with another application of magic returning it to the shabby state it was in before. The rearmost knights walk on the border of this un-cleaning layer, just ahead of it, in perfect lockstep. I can see in the air the remnants of some sort of bubble, even transforming the air as it passes. The humming recedes as the procession moves out of view.

As I scan my surroundings again, I see a crumpled mass under a sack cloth on the sidewalk. Warily, a few demi-humans emerge from the surrounding shops and check on it. It’s an old man. As each lifts up the sack cloth to see it, I can see them visibly sob and cover their mouths. He was crushed by the carriage’s gravity magic, he couldn’t get out of the way in time. A small crowd gathers around, crying out and shouting. I’ve got to go help.

I quickly run downstairs with the bare minimum of my equipment. As soon as I reach this small crowd of about 15 demi-humans, they turn to look at me and scream “GO AWAY!”. “BEGONE!”, which stops me in my tracks. A younger looking one with raccoon-like ears pushes through them and approaches me, grabs me by the arm and hauls me over to the crumpled victim. “This is what they do to us”, he seethes. I can sense the pure hostility emanating from all of them. Poking out from under the sackcloth, I can see two legs, twisted like spaghetti, bruised and battered. What should be a normal man-shaped victim, is a flattened, twisted, rended pile of dirty cloth and grey-blue limbs. It’s unlike any car accident I’d ever worked; this was something different. Carelessness? Royal privilege? What would drive someone like this to simply ignore an old man getting crushed to death? “You should leave now.”, he says. It seems they just wanted me to see it. I’m left standing, a witness to this crowd on the other side of the street, moaning and crying at this tragedy.

With more than a little frustration, I decide to go for a walk to clear my head. What in God’s name did I just witness? I’m supposed to be the chief of police here? Am I supposed to send unarmed men to try and arrest that… thing? Would bullets even do anything to him? Do the laws even cover things like this? The one thought pervading my mind is how powerless I feel, how completely out of my element I am, and… why doesn’t my back hurt? This has been nagging at me ever since I came here. Every day, for the last 10 years, whenever I bend over or run, my lower back stabs at me as vengeance for daring to tax it. It was always especially worse whenever I supervised a homicide scene or got frustrated. As stupid as it is, this does more to throw me off than what I just witnessed. I used that pain as something to keep me grounded, now I feel absolutely nothing.

Ahead of me is some great creature, a full two feet taller than me, with a swishing reptilian tail, plodding along. It looks like some kind of small dragon. No, a lizard, no wings. He sees me and stops, before politely stepping aside to let me by. I must look pretty strange to these people in these clothes of mine. My typical office uniform; plaid button-down shirt, khakis, a shiny badge on my hip, a holstered pistol. I must look unlike any human they’re used to. Maybe the standard law enforcement get-up has the same effect here that it does back home.

I find what seems to be a small standing-room-only restaurant, or bar. It’s empty, except for one figure leaned over the bar at the very end, clearly out of it. I decide to step in to ask the barkeep some questions. Lining the walls, from end to end is an assortment of swords, shields, polearms and axes, neatly displayed on mounts jutting from the wall. From below the bar, I see two horns sticking up from what appears to be a helmet, moving around busily, clinking glasses and plates. That must be him.

The horns pop up and suddenly I find myself (relatively) at eye level with an extremely short, bearded man glaring at me with black eyes. Stockily built, wearing a traditional leather blacksmith’s getup, he glares at me. “WHADDAYA WANT?”, he asks with the barest minimum of tact. It’s a dwarf!

“Well, I had some questions about that procession that just rolled through here”-

He cuts me off immediately.

“NOT HAPPENING. BUY SOMETHING OR GET OUT.”

“Okay, okay, what’s on tap?”

“MEAD.”

“One mead, then.”

“VERY GOOD!”, he announces with a sudden inflection of glee.

After slamming this cheap, splintery tankard of foamy liquid death onto the bar in front of me, he asks, in a much quieter tone, “Whaddaya wanna know?”

I start with the basics. “Who was that, and what the hell was that?’

“That was one of the regional lords, His Eminence Uragas the Fifteenth. He owns this quarter of the city.”, the dwarf explains, wryly.

“When he rolled through, his carriage crushed an old man to death. No one stopped to render aid or check on him. Is that normal here?”

“Yes, of course, slimes don’t concern themselves with ‘fleshbags’. We are not people to them, we’re something less than that. Especially dwarves. Some slimes have a policy of killing dwarves on sight.”

“Isn’t that murder? How can they get away with that?”

“Murder? Don’t make me laugh. They’re rich, they make the rules. We’re lucky they haven’t ousted all of us yet. There’s even a cult of slime worship that exists purely to feed their egos.”

“How many slimes are there in the city?”, I ask, my concern growing exponentially as this conversation carries on.

“About twenty; but the only ones worth worrying about are the Lords, who own all the land surrounding the city. After the War, they moved in and bought vast tracts of land, thinking they could strong-arm the Royal Family by ‘owning’ the population. They’re truly rotten.”

“How many Lords are there?”

“Five, but two of them are not slimes, and as such are losing political power. So, three slimes, two humans. If you want me to tell you any more, drink that mead I just gave you.”

I reluctantly obliged. It stinks, it’s warm, foamy, and given this morning’s indulgence, and this evening’s events, I’m barely hanging on at this point. After a slimy and unpleasant chug, I see the strange figure at the other end of the bar jump up from his stool. He staggers his way over to me and drops a crude, dirty letter on the bar next to me, sealed with a wax stamp. He gives a silent goodbye wave and disappears out the front door. From the shape of his hooded cloak, I can see he might have elven pointy ears, but his skin tone was a strange, sickly grey color. Before I can ask, my ears are rocked with an, (at this point), familiar admonition: “THERE YOU ARE!”. It’s Leia. This time, in a darker colored robe trimmed with gold accents, her familiar piercing blue eyes and rather upset expression says everything I need to know. I’m in trouble.

“Come here at once! I can’t believe you! I leave you alone for one hour and you run off on your own!”

I reluctantly shuffle back to her, her arms folded and fuming with rage, blocking the doorway to the bar. The dwarven barkeep has vanished, as I turn to him to try and proffer an explanation. Back we go to the hotel, where I’m forced to recount what’s happened. The next half hour impresses me deeply – she could be a great detective. She worms every last detail out of me without even a moment to explain my motivations. Once she’s satisfied, I’m lectured for what feels like forever until she acquiesces and allows me to ask questions of my own. This is going to be a long night.