Nokie's Story

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Nokie
Sojourner
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Joined: Sat Jan 27, 2001 6:01 am
Location: Atlanta, GA, USA
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Nokie\'s Story

Postby Nokie » Tue Jul 17, 2001 8:28 pm

Will repost when HTML is enabled...

Nokie Quickfingers

Prologue

Nokie Quickfingers sat alone inside the Blushing Mermaid Tavern, keeping to the shadows. If one were to look closely at Nokie, they would see deep brown eyes and a weathered, rounded face. He wears his sandy-blonde straw-like hair in a pony-tail and he is missing the pinky finger on his high hand. The Blushing Mermaid Tavern is located near the port inside the huge city of Baldurs Gate along the Sword Coast. Nokie arrived in Baldurs Gate by ship from Calimport just a week before under unusual circumstances. He was running from something or someone back in Calimport. Sitting alone in the tavern, Nokie thought back to the events leading up to his flight from Calimport and how it could have turned out differently.


Calimport, City of Decadence - The Beginning

Nokie was born in the halfling shire district of Calimport. His early life was hard, but not completely harsh. He was an only child, as his mother died during childbirth. His father owned a small pastry shop, and at an early age, Nokie was working for his father. He possessed exceptional dexterity and agility, even for a halfling. Nokie could do amazing feats with objects by balancing them on his nose, or sleight-of-hand tricks.

As time went on, the pastry shop fell on hard times and money ran out. In Calimport, almost every private business has to pay off the local rogues guild for ‘protection’. It’s an elaborate extortion scheme which is simply a fact of life in Calimport. The city government is too corrupt to do anything about it, so it’s a tradition which has been going on for as long as the city is old. Failure to pay the protection money can result in a shop owner being roughed up, or even sometimes murdered. Late one evening, the local rogues guild bust down the door to their small home and murdered Nokie’s father by slitting his throat. Nokie’s father was to be made an example so others would know to pay up. Usually they only murder the father and leave the wife and kids to fend for themselves. In this case since it was just Nokie, they kidnapped him to be a slave.


Early Guild Life

Life as a slave for a thieves guild is harsh. Nokie was forced to do menial tasks and was often beaten. This went on for a couple of years until one day Nokie caught the eye of a guild lieutenant named Cedius. Cedius was tall for a human, and ugly by their standards. He wore a faded gray beard and walked with a limp. Cedius was a veteran thief and was respected by his guild-mates, or at least as respected as one could expect in a thieves guild. Cedius recognized that Nokie showed the potential to be a good thief, so he took Nokie in under his wing to train him in the correct ways of stealth and burglary.

With Cedius as a teacher, Nokie learned a great deal about being a rogue. The training went on for three years. During this time, Cedius taught Nokie all he could offer. After Nokie turned fifteen, it was time for him to start earning his keep. The guild pasha was impressed by Nokie’s relatively quick training and wanted him to start earning the guild some money. Nokie’s first assignment was basic pick-pocketing in the Calimport bazaar. He did this with no problem and continued to do more elaborate and more risky assignments for the guild.


Accession

With his burglary and stealing career doing so well, Nokie attracted the unwanted attention from the other rogues competing in the same guild. Because of Cedius’s admiration and Nokie doing so well, he rose in the ranks very quickly, surpassing others who had been with the guild a lot longer. His success caused some jealousy to form in the ranks. It was a crime to steal from ones own guild. If a rogue was caught keeping some of the loot for themselves, they were immediately killed.

One particular rogue who despised Nokie a great deal was Renala. She was a half-elf who used her womanly charms almost as much as her thieving skills to get to her position in the guild. She felt threatened by Nokie’s success and wanted him out of the picture. While Nokie was out on a mission one night, Renala planted some jewels in Nokie’s room and convinced a high ranking guild member (whom she had also been bedding with) to search Nokie’s room. They discovered the planted Jewels, and word quickly spread that Nokie was stealing from the guild. When Nokie returned from his mission, he was hauled before the pasha and the charges were brought before him. Cedius managed to convince the guild boss to spare Nokies life and cast him out instead. The pasha agreed to this, but wanted to teach Nokie a lesson. So, before being cast out, Nokie was tied town and his right pinky finger was sliced off with a red-hot blade.


Independent Life

With no family and no friends and no guild and most importantly no money, Nokie had to fend for himself. He used his skills to acquire some money for food and lodging. Nokie decided that he could never trust anyone and would never be apart of a guild again. Normally, no rogue would be foolish enough to be independent in a city like Calimport. A rogue was either apart of a guild, or they were dead in the street.

Nokie changed his demeanor and learned how to be a master of disguise. He took on the appearance of a bumbling, happy-go-lucky halfling who would appear harmless. This approach worked nicely for Nokie, and he stuck with it forever. As time went on Nokie did quite well for himself alone. He was always careful not to intrude upon other rogues work, so not to invoke the wrath of a guild.

Nokie honed all of his skills and became one of the best rogues in Calimport, if not all of the sword coast. He was known by reputation among most of the guilds, but remained for the most part untouchable. He spent a lot of his time in a halfling tavern called The Copper Ante. There he picked up contracts for various jobs. The proprietor of The Copper Ante guaranteed his safety while in the tavern in return for information on other guild activities. By this time in his career, Nokie was beyond petty theft and used his master skills of stealth and avoidance to infiltrate guildhalls and gather information. Everyone knew that The Copper Ante was simply a front for a halfling rogues guild, and Nokie was offered a high-ranking position within the guild on several occasions, but always turned them down.


Crossing the Line

Nokie never considered himself greedy and didn’t live the rogues life for the materialistic rewards. He wanted to be the best at his craft, and continued in the profession to continually improve. However, on one occasion he got too greedy. During one of his information gathering missions inside a prominent guildhall, Nokie learned that the pasha of a very powerful guild acquired a magical dagger which bestowed its wielder with incredible powers.

Nokie was no novice when it came to combat and considered his fighting abilities to be second to his rogue skills. So upon learning about this dagger, Nokie decided that he had to have it. Unfortunately the dagger was kept in the pasha’s private chamber which was heavily guarded.

For a rogue of Nokie’s skill, getting into the guildhall wasn’t a difficult task. He simply disguised himself as a low-ranking member and entered through a window or locked door. Sometimes, for fun, Nokie would even dare to sneak through the front door! For this job, Nokie was very cautious and entered in the dead of night through a locked door on the second floor.

After gaining entrance, Nokie used his skills to move throughout the guild completely unseen. The pasha’s room was located off the audience chamber. The entrances to the pasha’s room as well as the audience chamber were both guarded with two sentries each. Nokie could have simply killed the sentries in both areas but prided himself on being able to pull off a job with no one knowing he was even there. Moving with perfect stealth, Nokie managed to sneak by the two sentries outside the audience chamber. As he stealthily moved past them, he smiled at how easy it seemed to nearly walk past two guards almost under their noses!

The pasha’s room was a more difficult task. It was a locked door with reinforced steel bands. The two guards outside that door were more skilled and it wouldn’t be a simple matter of sneaking past them. Nokie decided that he would have to disable them and move quickly enough before they were discovered by patrolling guards. While creeping in the shadows, Nokie quietly removed a dart gun from his pack and applied a very potent sleeping poison, acquired indirectly from a drow, to two darts. Care had to be taken with the poison as it would become useless when exposed to sunlight.

Hiding in the shadows about twenty-five feet away from the guards, Nokie would have to hit both of them almost instantly. If he took too long hitting only one of them, the other guard would call out an alarm. Nokie sucked in his breath and aimed. He fired and in the same motion, loaded and fired at the second guard. Both fell to the floor, fast asleep.

Nokie quickly rushed to the door and had a larger challenge of getting in. The door lock was likely well defended. Nokie examined the lock and saw what looked to be the trap. He was about to disarm it, but changed his mind and shifted his attention to another part of the lock. Upon closer inspection, he saw the real trap. The first one had been a decoy! Working quickly but carefully, Nokie used a rare adamantium lockpick and with a *snick* managed to disarm the trap and unlock the door.

Inside the pashas lavishly adorned chamber was a large canopy bed with three sleeping figures. It was the pasha with his two slave girls. Nokie reminded himself that he didn’t have a lot of time, so he crept over to the nightstand and saw his mark. A plain-looking dagger rested on the nightstand, but Nokie knew that was the dagger he came after. He was wearing a special earring which gave him the ability to detect magical items. This plain looking dagger was glowing very brightly with magical light, so it must be powerful indeed!


Escape

As Nokie grabbed the dagger, he felt a surge of power course through his veins. This was pure elation to Nokie, but at the same time, a pang of fear, as he also heard a magical alarm of off. Damn! The dagger was magically trapped! Nokie should have known better that the pasha wouldn’t leave such a powerful item sitting out in plain sight unprotected. The alarm woke the pasha who bolted up and looked directly at Nokie, just as he was fleeing the room. Nokie knew that the pasha recognized him. There were more pressing matters though with the alarm sounding and the entire house alerted.

Nokie bolted from the room and using his amazing dexterity, managed to trip the two guards coming into the audience chamber. He had to get out quickly. He headed down another hallway and climbed the stairs to the second floor. By pure luck, no one was coming down that way.

He dove into the first room on his right to see two guards arming themselves on the other side of the room. It must be the barracks wing. In one swift motion, Nokie drew a dagger from his belt and launched it into the throat of one of the guards. He drew his newly acquired magical dagger and his other dagger to face the remaining guard. Nokie was very skilled at fighting with two daggers, but preferred to remain behind the scenes. A toe-to-toe fight with a well armored burly guard would be tough, even for someone of Nokies skill. Still, Nokie was pressed for time as by now the entire guild was hunting for him. Behind the guard was a window he could use to escape through. Nokie had to kill this guard and get out through that window. He feinted an attack at the guard to judge his skill. The guard easily parried the attack and came after Nokie. Nokie was smaller and quicker than the guard and evaded the attack. Using his new dagger, Nokie landed a hit on the guard’s side. As the dagger sank into the guards flesh, it flashed with a magical blue light and the guard screamed in agony. Nokie then hit him again with the second dagger in the leg, cutting the hamstring. The guard fell to his knees and Nokie completed the attack by plunging the magical dagger into his back. Again, the dagger flashed and blew a large hole in the mans chest, who promptly fell over quite dead.

Sparing no time to look in awe at the powerful weapon, Nokie clambered out through the window and onto the rooftops. He was in a big predicament now. The pasha saw him and recognized him. The entire resources of the guild would be used to hunt Nokie down and kill him for stealing from the pasha. Nokie couldn’t realistically remain in Calimport. Not even the Copper Ante would provide him protection from the power of this guild. Nokie decided he had to leave Calimport as soon as possible.

Nokie made his away along the rooftops as quickly and silently as possible to the docks in the south-western quadrant of Calimport. There he used his stealth to get himself onboard a ship bound for Baldurs Gate. In the decks below, Nokie managed to bust into a crate and remain hidden in case they came looking for him on any of the ships.

Fortunately the night went on with no interruption and the ship headed out for Baldurs Gate.


Conclusion

As he sat in the Blushing Mermaid Tavern, Nokie reflected on his foolishness to steal the dagger from such a powerful guild. He knew that even in Baldurs Gate, he wasn’t safe from the pasha and his guild. In matters like this, they usually hired some skilled assassin to hunt down and kill the offender.

Nokie decided that he would soon head north again for Waterdeep, city of splendors. Maybe there he would be far enough away from the wrath of the pasha. He still needed to discover the powers of this unusual dagger he acquired. Perhaps he would take up mercenary work or go into hiding.

One thing was certain for Nokie. He was going to have a very interesting and challenging journey ahead of him.
Nokie
Sojourner
Posts: 786
Joined: Sat Jan 27, 2001 6:01 am
Location: Atlanta, GA, USA
Contact:

Postby Nokie » Wed Jul 18, 2001 12:14 am

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[This message has been edited by Nokie (edited 07-17-2001).]

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