Yes, I'm sure you're eager to hear about Shaville. I knew it was about time to head home when that malcontent started gaining steam in the capitol before the Geosian uprising.
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Yeah, that older daughter of the Chaotic champion who married the Stone Dragon. When people talk about the uprising, a lot of people only talk about the final year, when Midas finally got off his ass and started doing something about them. He didn't know this, but that woman had been attending rallies in the capitol for decades. While I was in the Inquisition, I went to one of the first rallies she ever led and I never saw any difference between the woman on that stage and the one who sat the throne. Her ideas were dangerous and I didn't want my daughters exposed to them. So, we packed up and moved back to my home village. It is about as far west as you can get without stepping into... well, your country. I did so because I was hoping to give my girls the peaceful, wholesome upbringing I had. I've never been afraid to walk into conflicts like the uprising, but I didn't want it in my yard, you know?
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Well, Sophia didn't take the threat seriously, so she resented me uprooting everyone. The only reason I'm glad she's sai'mul like me is because she survived to see me vindicated. Karen Blackstone was nothing but trouble, and she has to know now that if I had chosen our new home better, we could have protected all three of them.
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No. I'm not guilty about my choice. I regret it now in hindsight, but I had no way of knowing that it was infested with some of the most evil bastards to call themselves human. I wanted to believe it was the same as ever, and at first, that's the way it seemed. I'm just angry about being deceived. I'll probably take that out on every warlock I ever get my hands on for the rest of my life.
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Well, what good does it do us to lie about that? I've never needed a reason to be honest, but if I'm not in this case, people could die, right?
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I'm not worried. Either you'll decide I can be trusted and renegotiate our contract or you won't and I will go back to the work we agreed upon. You can make up your mind on your own, but it won't help to omit anything. If any of the people I'm to be hunting bring dark magic to the fight, they may never see the inside of a cell.
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I stood shoulder to shoulder with spellwarriors in the Inquisition and I've been paid to track down some of Hem Academy's more troublesome dropouts since the Purge. I think I know enough about magic to tell the difference. I think we both know I can handle magic users or we wouldn't be talking right now.
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Well, you got me there. These warlocks had been getting away with their shit under my nose for years and I don't have much excuse for that. But let's get this right. I knew something was going on nearly the whole time. The warlocks were good at covering their tracks, but they let just enough go with every crime for me to work it out slowly. It was my duty to keep the town safe, but it was difficult to find solid evidence of a crime more serious than public fornication.
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Yes, that was one of the warlocks' tricks. Every lustful impulse in the village was magically amplified. They farmed their succubi by driving these feelings beyond their victims' control to the point that the ambient dark magic that they filled our town with would respond to their lust and transform them.
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That's just how the spellwarriors and their templar hanger-on explained it. I'm not exactly an expert on lust or magic, so I'm afraid that's as specific as my description gets.
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No, their operation for creating wrathar was, if possible, even harder to catch. The people fucking themselves stupid in the streets were a lot more visible than the meatheads who fought it out in the Fight Pit.
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No, they're not legal in Resta. Anymore.
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Anyone who fought in the pit was basically asking for the warlocks to warp their minds with mindless aggression. Their process for creating succubi couldn't have been so efficient because if you put a cage around most people, the last thing on their mind is sex. But put someone in a cage and a weapon in their hands, they have no problem with fighting. Everyone I've ever known who fought there disappeared. Guess where.
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Sure. I've had to break up plenty more fights than I remember from childhood. The people involved weren't usually fighters, but spectators. But I could guarantee that if I didn't get them out of town quickly enough, they'd end up in the center of that pit eventually. Fortunately, those poor fools were the easiest to save because their fights were plenty of reason to banish them from village. I could grab two idiots fighting trying to rip out each other's throats, send them out of here on separate buses, and they'd be fine a few days later.
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It was a slow process realizing something was wrong. All of the sex was the first sign. It took me longer to notice the fighting because I'd seen plenty of it in the city. But what ultimately tipped me off was how much everyone seemed to love being there. In those days, Shaville was a complete shithole compared to when I was growing up there, but nobody ever wanted to leave. The village was always crawling with tourists even though the fucking Pit and a small Theater were the most interesting places we had there. And without fail, I'd hear them talking about moving there permanently. You'd think such a popular place would have an explosive population, right?
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Well, it didn't. People showed up in droves and nobody ever seemed to leave, but we never had to build any new houses. There was no shortage of space, but nobody on the outgoing buses. Some of those tourists did become part of the village, but they only seemed to replace the longtime locals who were disappearing too. I knew that my job had become harder than it had for the old constable and yet people were still going there never to be seen again. There had to be a reason, and I spent all of a decade trying to find it.
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I did say this was about Sophia, didn't I? Well, we never had the strongest of marriages. We used to be the best of friends, but she had needs that I could never empathize with. But Shaville had plenty of outlets for her frustration that she frequently took advantage of. I tried to ignore that it was happening, thinking she could at least be happy with fucking tourists.
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No, this isn't about my cheating wife. I didn't care what she did with her sexuality as long as she kept it out of my bed. But I think that by turning a blind eye, I encouraged her to get bolder. She eventually stopped respecting even that boundary. I'd already had it up to here with the surge in petty crime by that point, so I decided then that I wanted to move again. But for Sophia and my daughters, the trap was already sprung. My family had all reacted differently to moving to Shaville, but they were unanimous in their firm desire to stay. So, there was nothing I could do but watch as they became regular parts of a village that I was convinced was far from normal.
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Well, I continued to work with the spellwarriors trying to get to the bottom of things, but it wasn't going well. They started to show signs of being seduced by Shaville's curse and I was at my wit's end. I found them arguing with their templar friend just before the Purge. They were arguing against some evil that the templar was considering at the time which I only realize in retrospect was her plan to muster the entire Blackstone Order and destroy the whole village and kill all of its inhabitants. At the time, I thought that the templar had been confronted by the Fight Pit, and I tried to put her out of my mind when she disappeared. I thought she was just another wrathar being shipped off to some warlord's army, but she actually left. Even I couldn't do that!
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Well, Sophia destroyed whatever semblance of a bond we had just before the Purge. It started with finding out my middle child Sasha was whoring herself to tourists. I had never been so angry! She was out on her ass almost immediately, but Sophia took issue with that. She could have tried to remind me of my love for our daughter. Or that I was obligated to be a father to her no matter what she did. Instead, she called me a prude and criticized me for not being as sexually active as she was.
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Look, don't get me wrong. It's not as if I care about others expressing their sexuality. But some people can't handle it, and that's why doing it in public is against the law. Any constable would be disappointed in their children for resisting the charter they had dedicated themselves to upholding. I'm not even against those who wish to sell their sexual skills for a time. I might have felt different about it back then, especially where my daughter was concerned, but I can only barely remember the days when my sword arm wasn't for sale. A bit hypocritical, right?
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Yes, I'm ashamed of how I treated her. All I can say in my defense was that I was already paranoid at the time. I knew that dark magic was in play and I had long since ceased to trust anybody, even my family who insisted that we stay.
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Maybe I was affected by the curse too. I managed to avoid the warlock's corruption, but I was stuck there as surely as everyone else. I wouldn't leave without my family, but I was powerless to get them to leave. I wonder a lot about whether they could have been saved if I'd taken the choice away from them. I could never have done so back then, though. Not just because I wouldn't have wanted to but because I know it would have been impossible. It was clear by the time I had started to figure out what was going on that nobody needed me at home.
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Well, we argued about Sasha all night, but she was back the next day as if we had settled on what Sophia had wanted. Just like that, the entire household had turned against me. All four of them had become more brazen with their corrupted lifestyles for their last week while just berating the hell out of me for daring to question them.
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It wasn't even the worst week I've had but it was definitely up there. My reputation around the village was for being a quack and they began wasting no opportunity to repeat it to me. I had six hellish days, seven infuriating hours, and twenty-three fucking minutes in which my family beat the notion that I had lost them into my head.
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What changed? I found my youngest, Emily, beginning to turn. She thought she could hide that she was growing a tail, but you can't keep that a secret from someone who is both your father and a trained investigator on high alert. By the gods, when I saw that fucking tail, I stripped every single one of them and their mother to find more evidence of transformation.
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Fangs in my wife's mouth. Fucking wing nubs on Penny. And Sasha? She was hiding several large splotches of unnaturally pink skin and a few strands of white hair behind her ears. That settled it for me. I began to see them as victims of the warlocks that I was desperate to save. I bound them all up, thinking I would turn them over to the templars so they could attempt to purify them. I only wanted to help them, but they really let me have it for restraining them. My entire family was turning into demons before my very eyes, but when they cried out to me, they were a little too good at making me feel like the asshole.
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They were all destroying me. It's not easy to admit this, but I began to cry. It was too much to watch four people who used to love you change so much. I wanted to know where these monsters were keeping my real wife and children, but I didn't have an actual plan to get them back. But it wasn't long before I paid for that moment of weakness. While I wasn't looking, Emily had somehow used her tail to wriggle free and release her mother and sisters. They got the drop on me and just stomped me halfway to hell. They did it while LAUGHING. I don't know who I hated more in that moment: them or myself. And I never really got around to figuring that out.
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That was when the Purge happened. Six templars came in at that moment and started killing everybody in the house one by one. They got Penny with an arrow, one of them pulled Emily to him by her tail and pummeled her to death with an iron club, then they seared Sasha in some sort of holy light that caused her entire body to disintegrate. I was still laying face up on the ground when Sophia was stabbed in the back with a sword. While she was falling, I remember thinking how I was satisfied with this outcome just before the same man stabbed me in the chest.
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Don't be. I've made my peace with what happened. It was naive for me to think I could have put a stop to this all by myself. Do I agree with what the templars did to the village? Absolutely not. But when the spellwarriors we trust to deal with magic fall victims to the same curse as everyone else and the templars we trust to deliver us from evil decide we're beyond saving, who can argue with their logic?
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The point is, I died with a smile on my face. Yes, I failed to protect my family, but by bringing the templars' attention to Shaville, I may have saved countless others. I had thoughts of dying a hero and getting to see my Sophia, Penelope, Sasha, and Emily in Fadal. As I remembered them.
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