Under Lock and Key

Once inside the guard barracks, Cael was stripped and sprayed with water, before being given a plain white roughspun tunic and pants. The guards then ushered him into an administrative processing room, where a dour-faced man in brown robes sat behind a desk. The robed secretary motioned for Cael to sit in the chair across from him. When Cael didn't react, the guard behind him thumped him on the back of the head with a truncheon hard enough to get his attention and pointed to the chair. Cael finally complied and walked forward, flopping into the wooden chair lazily, with obvious disdain.The guard behind him thumped him again and he straightened up, snarling at the man as he rubbed the back of his head.

"Hold out your hand, please." The dour faced secretary said, pulling a piece of gilded parchment off the top of an identical stack on the left side of the desktop. Once Cael held his hand out, the secretary removed a thin lancet from inside his robes and pricked the end of one of Cael's fingers. He then pressed the bleeding fingertip to the parchment's surface, and waited. The couple of blood drops that fell onto the paper seemed to dilute, before disappearing entirely. A moment later, the parchment began to glow faintly as lines of text and numbers filled the page in red and black ink. Within a minute, the glow faded, leaving behind a certificate covered with information about Cael and his abilities.

Assessment Sheets served a lot of purposes. Each one, when provided the blood of a person, would tell you almost everything you would want to know about them, including their True Name, height, weight, age, birth sex, race, acquired skills, and core attribute values. Attribute values were the universal objective way of gauging someone's aptitude in a given field. They ranged in value from 1 to 255, with one being the lowest possible score, and 255 being the highest. Many employers in the city would require an Assessment Sheet to be provided to them by any potential employee they were looking to hire, and if the prospect's scores were too low in a given area, it was considered perfectly legal to deny them the job. It was not uncommon for Assessment Sheets to be falsified by a hedge wizard in exchange for some coin, so even the most objective possible measurement wasn't always reliable.

Glancing at his sheet, Cael could see that his scores hadn't changed in the last two weeks. Strength and Fortitude were average, with Intelligence, Wisdom, Charm, and Agility being above average. But there at the very bottom was the one stat that served as the bane of his existence: Luck.

His Luck score, for reasons neither he nor anyone else could figure out, was stuck at 1.

He'd come to this discovery a year ago when he'd burgled a house in the Spice District with Shoggi and a few others. The absentee owner of the place had a small stack of unused Assessment Sheets in his desk, and Cael nicked them. When he finally saw his Luck score for the first time that night, nothing ever seeming to go right for him made a lot more sense.

Not, of course, that knowing the cause of the problem in any way helped solve it. The universe itself, for whatever cruel reason, saw fit to conspire against every single action he took, lining fate up in such a way that if there was a worst possible outcome that could happen when he did something, it was almost guaranteed to happen.

For a normal person, today's move would have gone without a hitch. He would have made everyone afraid to approach him, tackled the merchant, struggled with him for a moment, and then Shoggi would have stepped in, pulling Cael off of him while at the same moment nicking his purse. Shoggi would then guide Cael away from the crowds while apologizing profusely. They would round a corner, enter another alleyway, drop the purse in a false brick drop point for later retrieval, and then go their separate ways to avoid being tailed back to the safe house.

But Cael was not a normal person. And any time he lost sight of that it always came back to grab him by the neck. Like today.

The secretary picked up the Assessment Sheet and examined it for a moment, pausing for a few extra seconds at the bottom of his Attributes list. The secretary's mouth twitched slightly as he set the paper to the side and faced Cael, resting his elbows on the desktop and steepling his fingers.

"Well, Mr. Bernog. It appears your luck hasn't improved since last we saw each other." The dour-faced man said, the corner of his mouth threatening a smile.

Cael leaned back in the chair and crossed his arms behind his head casually.

"Whatever your speech is, save it. You and I both know I have no interest in talking." He said, before picking something from between one of his teeth with a pointed fingernail.

The secretary's face hardened.

"Quite. Well, we'll see if-"

"If a few weeks in a holding cell loosen my lips?" Cael asked, cutting the man off. He flicked the scum on the end of his fingernail onto the floor of the interview room. "I wouldn't count on it."

"We'll see." The man said, scowling. He looked past Cael at one of the guards and motioned towards Cael and then the door on the other side of the room. "Take the prisoner to cell 43. He won't be needing to eat or sleep for a few days."

Before Cael could say anything else, an iron-hard grip clapped onto his shoulder and pulled him to his feet. "Let's go, forktongue" The guard said, half-walking, half-shoving Cael towards the exit. The riveted iron door creaked outwards into another passageway seemingly of its own accord, and shut behind them again as soon as they were on the other side.

Cael said nothing as he was guided down the corridor, and eventually down a long spiral staircase into another, much smaller, much darker passageway. About halfway down the hall, the guards came to a stop, and the one not restraining Cael shoved a large metal key into a rusted metal cell door. The latch popped free with a squeal and a snap, opening onto an unlit, damp cube of stone brick perhaps five feet in every dimension. Before he could say anything, a boot planted itself square into his back, and he tumbled headfirst into the tiny room. He threw his hands out in front of himself to break his fall, but not in enough time to keep himself from painfully slamming face-first into the water-soaked stone. The iron door slammed behind him and locked back, and within moments the boot steps of the two guards receded out of earshot, leaving him alone with his thoughts.

The room was too short to stand up in or lay down in, so he finally resigned himself to sitting on the damp ground with his back against the cold metal of the cell door and wait for Shoggi or one of the others to come bail him out.

To keep himself entertained, he started counting every stone that made up the cell's floor, walls, and ceiling. He was glad to have darkvision, or else he'd have nothing to do at all. After 643 stones, he ran out of things to count, and set about singing. He started softly at first, but grew louder and louder until he was finally interrupted by another pair of guards who informed him in no uncertain terms that if he persisted a moment longer, they were going to beat him until he couldn't open his mouth. Deciding not to test how credible this threat actually was, he stopped.

Having no real sense of time in the pitch black cube he was staying in, Cael still couldn't help but get the sense that getting bailed was taking a good deal longer than a couple hours. He didn't doubt Shoggi, which meant either his sense of how much time had passed was skewed, or something had happened to prevent him or the rest of the gang from getting him out like they usually did. The second option did not sit well with him. If that is what was happening, then that meant something greater was going on in the behind the scenes political struggle between the gangs, the Shega, and the City Guard, and he was caught in the middle somehow.

Boy, wouldn't that just be his luck?

Finally resigning himself to a longer stay after what felt like several more agonizingly long hours, he adjusted his position so he was laying down on his side in the cell at an angle to give himself as much room as possible. He folded his knees and tucked his arm under his head in such a way to keep his spiral horns off the hard ground. Once he was as comfortable as he could manage in such unpleasant conditions, he closed his eyes. After what felt like another hour of restlessness, he finally drifted off into a fitful and uneasy sleep.