There are things in the world that are hard to explain. The intricacies of magic, the delicate politics between the numerous factions of the humanoid races, the rumored resurgence of ancient gods… All of these matters, and many more, boggled the greatest minds of the known world.

No less difficult to explain was why three mercenaries were loitering in the shadows of an alleyway, in the relatively sleepy town of Gladstone. Add the fact that one of the three was, by all appearances, rather dead, and you had yourself quite the brainteaser.

Fortunately, Gabriel found himself in the rare position where he was the man with the answers. Less fortunately, the two men he was answering to happened to be members of the Gladstone Town Watch.

“You see, one of the most poorly understood aspects of the soul is what anchors it. What ties the ethereal self to this meat machine of bone cogs and flesh gears? What makes a spirit unique and tangible when it is removed from the cart it rolls through the mortal realm in? How can the bodiless and uncontained be simultaneously somewhere and nowhere?” Gabriel supplied.

The watchman looked down at Figo’s doubled over body and raised an eyebrow, “So you’re sure he’s not dead?”

Gabriel sighed, “No, he’s not dead.”

The second of the two watchmen rubbed at his patchy beard, “He looks pretty dead. He must be pretty fucking drunk if he’s not dead.”

Gabriel scratched at his scalp like a rabid dog. A few flakes of dandruff fluttered onto his ponytail and got lost in the chestnut strands, “No, no. Not drunk either,” he smiled mirthlessly, “Just the soul thing.”

“Right,” the first watchman tapped his nose conspiratorially as he spoke, “He’s just, uh, out of his body right now.”

“Out of his fucking mind, more like,” the second guard declared.

“I assure you, he will be back within himself very shortly, and we’ll be on our way. Really, there is no need to trouble yourselves any more than you already have,” Gabriel suggested.

The first watchman looked skeptical, while the second apparently did not register that conversations generally have more than one participant, and carried on with his train of thought.

“My cousin got drunk like that once. Blacked out,” the guardsman said, “One minute we were down the Cantering Horse, havin’ a few drinks and propping up the barmaids on our knees, the next he shot out of the place like his arse were on fire. We found him the next morning on some farmer’s roof a mile out of town, naked, save for a curtain he’d been wearing as a cape.”

The guard hadn’t smiled or laughed as he regaled Gabriel with his story; he just continued to lean on his spear and chew his tongue like a wad of tobacco.

The first watchman adjusted his yellow sash over his breastplate and stared expectantly at Gabriel.

“… Right,” Gabriel fumbled for something to say, “Fascinating.”

Both watchmen nodded.

“Again though, not drunk,” Gabriel said for the thirteenth, no, fourteenth time.

“So how’d he get to be like this, then?” the first watchman enquired. It was becoming clear that this man provided both the brains and the girth for the pair.

“A good question!” Gabriel beamed, “My associate over there is a mind-mapper,” he said with a wave back down the alley, “He belongs to a small, elite community of individuals who are able to move a soul, or mind, from one place to another, and imprint it on a creature or object. It is a very rare skill, one that fewer than one in a thousand children is born with. That’s just within his tribe, which is the only place the ability has been proven to manifest. This makes him one of the rarest and most exceptional beings in the entire known world!” Gabriel explained with gusto.

The lead guard nudged the soul-less body with the toe of his boot, "He's a mind what now?"

Gabriel squeezed his eyes shut, "No, no, that's just Figo. His soul has been removed from his body by my other colleague, the mind-mapper," Gabriel thumbed over his shoulder once again. He couldn't quite understand why this wasn't all painfully obvious to the guards.

The second guard spat a wad of phlegm onto the floor, “What’s he doing?”

“What do you mean, 'What’s he doing?' He’s-” Gabriel looked over his shoulder to find his colleague groping in the dirt on all fours, “What are you doing, Vish?”

“I’m looking for my cricket,” Vish replied.

The first guard was pre-emptively glaring at Gabriel when he turned around, “Five copper fine for being drunk and disorderly in the streets.”

“Right, right, yep,” Gabriel nodded, fishing for the coins.

----

Five minutes later the two watchmen had waddled out of the alleyway, finally leaving Gabriel, Vish, and one comatose Figo, to go about their business in peace.

It was a serene night in Gladstone. A warm breeze gently stirred oil lamps hung from storefronts, and some of the more opulent waddle and daub houses. Laughter and song echoed into the clear night’s sky from taverns, and happy couples wandered the streets in the quiet district where Gabriel and his people hid, apparently unsuccessfully, in the shadow of the home they were surveying.

“Well that was a glorious, bloody disaster,” Gabriel declared once they were alone again.

Vish ignored his 'captain' and continued to stain the brown skin of his hands as he fumbled in the dark.

All things considered, they had been extremely lucky, but optimism seldom crept its way into Gabriel’s vocabulary. He pawed at his eyes clumsily, suddenly tired from the accidental socializing he had been forced to do. He wasn’t so much angry as he was sorrowfully resigned. He put a lot of effort into his schemes, and somehow they were consistently met with hiccups and hurdles, many of which manifested in the form of his 'team'.

Gabriel was a youngish man, but the lines around his eyes and creasing his forehead spoke of more years worth of frustrations than he could possibly have lived. The end result was that he had the kind of face that could be sold as anywhere from a youthful thirty-something to an exceptionally tired and preemptively jaded teenager.

By contrast, his older sister, who came bounding around the corner as Gabriel moped in the gutter, was full of the light of life, with sparks in her eyes that seemed to dance to the rhythm of the universe. She jangled as she came, as rows of silver and bronze bangles shuffled along her slender arms and bells and rings chattered in the braids of her fiery red hair. She had the joyful lust for life that only exists in the truly innocent, or the irredeemably stupid.

“Where the bloody hell have you been?” Gabriel chastised.

Bling, or Natasha, to use her birthname, opened her mouth to speak, caught the warning in her brother’s eyes, and closed it again just as quickly.

“You were supposed to be keeping watch! We got accosted by the city guard thanks to your negligence! What the hell did you have to do that was so important?” he dared to ask.

By way of answer, Bling uncurled her fingers to reveal a small, dirty, metallic disc. One edge shone in the moonlight whilst the rest was thoroughly submerged in – Gabriel hoped it was mud.

“A copper coin,” he stated rather than asked.

Bling grinned enthusiastically.

“Natasha, you wandering off cost us five copper coins. Five. See?” Gabriel held out his fingers to demonstrate, and even counted off on them to illustrate his point.

Natasha – Bling – stared vapidly at the digits dancing before her.

She smiled at her brother encouragingly.

“Just, never mind. Go wait over there,” Gabriel said, pointing at the mouth of the alley.

Bling dutifully skipped over to her station and sat on the floor, admiring her find.

Gabriel was able to enjoy a full twenty seconds of peace before he was disturbed again.

“Rodney!” Vish shouted from further down the alley, with zero appreciation for the clandestine nature of their operation, “You had me worried, friend!”

A mottled brown cricket was busy hopping towards Vish’s outstretched hand, where it sprang into the center of his palm and waited patiently.

“Must you be so loud?” Gabriel implored.

“Don’t worry about that miserable sod. I’m happy to see you, Rodney. Now let’s get this shit off of you and get you back into bed!” Vish said.

The 'shit' Vish was referring to was, in fact, Figo’s soul.

Vish knelt in front of Figo’s slumped body, placed a thumb and finger on Rodney the cricket’s little noggin, and, seconds later, Figo was breathing through his own lungs again.

“Welcome back,” Gabriel smiled at his twitching friend.

Vish had already shuffled off, far happier to be reunited with his pet cricket than to see Figo back safe and sound.

Figo was moving with the erratic grace typical of the highly caffeinated, but he was stable, and quickly gathering his wits.

“That,” Figo announced, not for the first time, “was not fun.”

The short haired blond tried to downplay his complaint by shooting Gabriel his patented half smile, which had strummed more than a few heart strings over the years, but succeeded only in drooling on his shoulder.

“What did you learn?” Gabriel probed, when he judged the young man to be ready for questions.

Figo accepted a waterskin and sipped gingerly as he reported.

“There are only two inside. They’re on the ground floor, chatting over a cup of wine. They seemed to be talking about foreign politics. Tindra was mentioned, along with Badanis and Jandrir. It was just gossip and hearsay, from what I could tell, although Hubert did express a desire to go to Tindra. That might be his intended destination,” Figo recalled.

Hubert was their mark. He was in his late teens, and he was wanted. Beyond that, they knew little about the man they had accepted a contract to capture.

“Irrelevant,” Gabriel asserted, “he’s not going anywhere but with us. Where are they?”

Figo gestured with his eyebrows, “There’s a dining chamber in the center of the building. There are two entrances, one facing us and the other leading towards the front door.”

“Good job,” Gabriel said, slapping his friend on the shoulder, “Vish, get over here. Natasha, you too. Natasha? Natasha!” Gabriel sighed, “Bling!”

Natasha looked up at that, and sauntered cheerfully over to her sour-faced brother.

“I don’t know why you still bother,” Vish said in his clipped way.

The mind-mapper had an abrasive manner of speech, which some argued was the side effect of a lifetime of segregation. Vish tended not to fit in, no matter where he went, and he truly stuck out in Gladstone, where he was one of the only people in the district to have brown skin. You were more likely to see an elf, Kkyrunnig or satyr than you were to see anyone with Vish’s mocha-terracotta complexion. Many speculated that it was life as a social pariah that was the cause of Vish’s unfriendly demeanor.

Gabriel was convinced he was just a bastard.

“Maybe, just maybe, you should shut the fuck up, Vish,” Gabriel cautioned.

Vish shrugged indifferently and amused himself by playing with a loose thread on his navy robe.

Vish wasn’t actually a mage, so to speak, but he liked the air of authority that the traditional garb gave him. Besides, describing his ability was tedious at times. It was much easier to just let people assume he was a sorcerer. As an added bonus, wearing a robe, as opposed to armour, meant you were generally overlooked when the stabbing and bludgeoning started.

The mind-mapper was semi-successful in his image. He did look like something of a sage, but perhaps a sage who got lost on his way back from a particularly heavy night at the pub, and spent the last decade wandering through fields and clambering over hedges. His hair and beard were trimmed, but none too neatly, and the black hairs were slowly losing the turf war to the invading greys. His eyes, the set of his mouth, and the craggy aspect of his skin, all made him look like a man of, well, forty-two. He looked forty-two. He was forty-two.

Gabriel, the 'leader' of their ragtag group, rubbed his temples and tried to bring everyone back on track. Bagging teenagers might not be the most noble of pursuits, but it was within even their meager capabilities. If he could keep everyone focused for five minutes then there was no reason why they couldn’t reach payday this time. He wasn’t about to let their goldfish attention spans embarrass him… Again.

Eventually, Gabriel managed to grab their attention long enough to outline a plan. They huddled together as Gabriel illustrated how events were about to unfold and, to their credit, each one listened to the best of his or her ability. Once Gabriel was satisfied that each member of his team knew their part, he sent them off to their respective positions.

Vish and Gabriel waited a few minutes and then, as planned, Vish smashed a window with the pommel of his sword. The pair were through the shattered glass and into the house seconds later, where they made a beeline for the chamber Figo had described to them.

Their mark and his accomplice reacted to the sound, but a fraction too slowly. They were rising from their chairs when Vish and Gabriel rudely announced themselves by knocking the door off its hinges and charging their targets with a, with a… War cry is a little too strong. Perhaps a battle cry? No. A ruckus cry? A ruckus cry. They charged their targets with a, somewhat, devastating ruckus cry.

The younger of the two men, who could only be Hubert, had a dagger in hand, but promptly decided that bringing a knife to a sword fight was allegorically stupid. Swiftly, he ducked past Gabriel and sprinted towards the far side of the room, heading for the main hallway.

The other man, a fifty-something gentleman with craters on his cheeks and forehead, had frozen at the sight of cold steel, and threw up his arms in surrender as Vish closed in on his position.

At least that was one down.

Hubert scarcely had time to think of his associate as he tore through the hallway at break-neck speed. When a coil of rope attached to a whistling arrow sprung through a side window and embedded itself in the doorframe he was about to charge through, it very nearly became literal break-neck speed. Hubert reacted just in time, ducking the rope and bursting the front door open with a low shoulder barge. He rolled onto the street beyond, a tangle of limbs, fumbling to find his footing.

Finding his footing was proving to be trickier than the teenager had expected. Hubert was very surprised to find that he seemed to have sprouted an extra pair of arms and legs in the chase, and more surprised still when a beaming redhead started chuckling at him from within his cloak - Bling hadn’t so much tackled the man as she had latched onto him like a barnacle.

The young man struggled meekly against his fleshy restraints, but quickly relented when he turned to find Figo aiming an arrow at that point between one’s eyes where sharp impacts tend to result in them becoming very, very dead.

Gabriel sauntered casually into the street with Vish and the other captive in tow.

“Hubert,” Gabriel smiled condescendingly at the sandy haired man wearing his sister, “your father would like a word.”