Mystis Ruins

[Pup]

I was sitting in my room at the base listening to some heavy metal rock. My jacket lay next to me hung over a chair. I lay on my bed staring at the roof with the memory of my parent’s murder still fresh in my mind. The blood across the wall and the sound of the bullets from the guns being fired rang clearly through my head. I started to drift off into a sleep when I was awoken by the sound of bombs going off near by. I ran up to see what was going on. I found massive craters in the woods near the base. I was wondering where these craters came from.

I slid down inside one of them and found a sword. It was engraved with strange markings of which I could not tell what they were or what they said. My head began running with thoughts of what the words meant. I took the item back into the base and ran some test on it. Luckily I had a new translation system installed a few days earlier. The only bad thing was that the ruins on the sword were so damaged it could only make out a few words.

“Templar…Mortmain…Mountains…Snow”

This was all the translator could make out form the damaged ruins. This was very interesting to me, I had heard that the Templar Knights had a secret base hidden somewhere in The Hinterlands. I always wondered if it was true or not that there was a base hidden among the ice and snow of the mountains that were in that region. My body began to shake thinking about what would happen if I were to find such a thing.

I walked back to my room and grabbed my jacket and then went to the storage facility deeper in the bunker. This room contained many items, from medical supplies to ammo for any guns that I would need at the time. I decided to grab one of the medical packs just in case of any problems with Church Agents. They always had bad timing of showing up where I always did.

I boarded the fast route flight to The Hinterlands. I was in a town that had no name. The Church had created this town, but gave it no name. The town had a theme that wasn’t common for this area, it was too modern. The Hinterlands was supposed to be an area of small farming towns, not big ones with cars and all the services. I found a bus that would take me to the nearest farming town, and this is where I would begin my search.

If my medical pack hanging on one shoulder I was dropped off at the small town of Oakvale. It was a small farming community where the people lived happily away from any Church authority. The Church didn’t seem to mind these small towns thinking that they were harmless and wouldn’t cause any trouble for them, and they were right to think that. I noticed an Inn at the far end of the town and a Pub next to it. Children were running around playing tag and hide and seek. I remembered a time when I played those games as a young boy. I walked over to the Inn and requested a room for the next week. It cost me a hunk of change but I didn’t complain about the price. I went up to the room I had rented out and placed down my belongings. Then I went to the local Pub to find information on the sword.

When I walked in everyone went dead silent. They stared at me with odd looking expressions on their faces. I guess they had never seen a wolf like me before. I didn’t even look at them I only walked over to the bar and talked to the bar keep about the sword I found. “Hello sir,” was my greeting I received. “What can I do you for?” I asked for some information on the Templar Knights and anything he may know about the sword I found. He looked it over with a fine tooth comb and gave me the name of a man that lived on the other side of the town by the name Kuga. It seems this Kuga knew a great deal about the Templar Knights and the sword. I said thanks and left him some money for the info. It was the least I could do for him after he helped me.

I walked over to Kuga’s house on the other side of town. It was an old run down shack that looked like it needed to be burned down and left for good. I walked up and knocked on the door. The door slowly crept open and I walked in. It was a dimly lit house with only a few rays of sunlight coming through the windows that were covered with blankets. As I walked around I saw items upon items that were portioning to the Templar Knights. I walked around the corner into the main room of the house and there I found Kuga, dead, shot in the head with a gun. This was the Churches doing I knew it. Some agents had beaten me to him and killed him before I could even talk to him.

I left the house and walked back to the Inn where I was staying and when to my room. I grabbed the medical kit and my jacket. I didn’t know if I was ready to even make the hike up the mountain, but I didn’t care I had to get up there and see what I could find. I left the Inn around noon and headed north to the mountain. When I reached the base I took out the sword and held it up to the mountain face. A light shined from the hilt and shot up throw the clouds and showed a tower high up on the steepest part of the mountain.

“That’s going to be one hell of a climb mister.” Said an evil voice form behind me. It was four Church agents. I asked if they were the ones that killed Kuga and the answered only with a shot from a gun. I dodge the shot and ran for cover behind a bolder. It was going to be tuff here. It was a four against one fight and I was going to lose if I didn’t do something fast. I ran scenarios though my head trying to find ways to kill them, but they all ended the same in my death. I decided to try something drastic, I held up the sword at the tower and then something happened. A light like a laser beam came down and destroyed the agents. I was amazed at what had just happened. The Templar Knights used laser weapons with refracting the sun light off the swords and the towers.

After seeing this I knew I wouldn’t be able to reach that tower with either dieing on the way up or the way down. I needed some other method of getting to the summit of the mountain. I went back to the Inn for the night and left the next morning to go back to the base so I could analyze the info that I gathered from this trip.

[KingMob]

The color of the sky was a television tuned in to a dead channel.

King Mob walked into the town and noticed how empty and desolate it was. Not in terms of population or activity mind you, the nameless town had plenty of that. Rather, the town lacked spirit, it somehow lacked a mind and soul that builds up inside a community of thinking men. It had about as much soul as a Toy Town built by a 6 year old with Tinkertoys. One could argue that the town was a base for The Church and that very fact contributes heavily to its lack of spirit and spontaneity. For the fact that the townspeople did not speak for our of anything short of necessity and the fact that there was nothing about them to suggest that they had an intelligence of any sort.

“It doesn’t matter,” King Mob thought. It couldn’t matter to him less that the town was basically a ghost town with a pulse rate. He was here on a business, Illuminati business, and that mattered above anything else. With his hands deep inside his cloak, he looked at the Mortmain Mountains. The steep, all mighty mountain that made home in the midst of the unforgiving hinterlands. The journey above it alone would kill a lesser man out of fear. The Knights Templar were no lesser men. King Mob prepared to climb it. Correction: King Mob climbed it, he did not prepare to climb it. King Mob never prepared for anything, he simply did or did not. In his eyes, the only acceptable form of preparation was for the spirit and the mind. The Mortmain Mountain housed many secrets and dangers over the course of its existence, much of it having to do with the now-defunct Knights Templar. One of the more dangerous, or less dangerous, secrets inside the mountain was the Helios Gladis or the Sun Blade. It was an exceptionally bright sword that the Templars could use to amplify the sunlight by a trifold, causing the snows on the mountain the melt and crash down on to their enemies below. The result was devastating and it made the Mortmain Mountain the ultimate fortress.

King Mob arrived at his location, a hidden grotto inside the Mortmain Mountains where the Sun Blade had been hidden over 5 centuries ago. Except the sword was not there.
“I’ve arrived too late, they already removed it.”
King Mob feared the worst. If the enemies had a-hold of the Sun Blade, it could spell doom for The Illuminati. The last safe place, The Mortmain Mountains, would be safe no longer. He hastily climbed down the mountains, back to the town and focused his mind on to the location of the Sun Blade. It was definitely close by, whoever had taken it did not get far. From atop the skies, he scanned the area and sensed an unnaturally large movement of Myrmidons near an Inn. A dozen Myrmidons, most of them in disguise, had the area under complete siege. This was both a good news and a bad news: Good news was that the sword was obviously in the holds of an Illuminate. The bad news was that getting the sword out of town safely would be difficult, especially with all these Myrmidons near the area. King Mob disguised himself as a shadow with the help of his cloak and snuck inside the Inn, where he was forced to survey every room in the Inn until he was narrowed down to just one. He picked the lock and invited himself in (manner was secondary to the success of the mission) and said “Pup Manners I presume?”

[Pup]

I was having another nightmare of my parent’s death again. The memory would never go away. It was like being hit by a train every time I thought about it or had a dream about it. My body was quaking from the fear of earlier that day. That beam killed those Myrmidons nothing but a pile of dust was left. I could shake the feeling that something was going to happen very soon.

I awoke the next morning in a dead sweat, and my body was cold from the mountain air. I got up and took a shower trying to wash away my worries. It helped some but not enough to really help me that much. I walked over to the medical kit I had brought with me and put a bandage on my left leg. I had cut it when I dove behind the rock yesterday. I didn’t notice the cut until I was back at the Inn in my room.

I had put on my cloths and was getting ready to leave when someone invited themselves into my room. He spoke my name and I was in shock. About the only people I ever told my last name to was the people I trusted. I didn’t even know this man, or how he knew my name. “Yes my name is Pup Manners, and who may you be?”