>>5786787>>5786879>>5787114[Thanks, anons. The nap helped a bit.]
>>5786519>>5786426>>5786225>>5786030>>5786027>>5786014>>5785945>>5785928>>5785891>>5785890>>5785876>>5785857Ugh. This guy.
“Get up,” you muttered. “You’re embarrassing me. More than you were already, I mean.”
You father hops from the crouch to his former wide stance with surprising ease—though you faintly hear his knees pop. He grins to hide a grimace of pain. How—WHY—is he still doing this ‘adventurer’ nonsense at his age? And when he’s not even turning a PROFIT anymore? Do old habits really die so hard?
Well then, you’ll help to kill them.
“You want to be in my life?” you asked him.
He’d nodded, and replied: “Emphatically!”
“Even if there’s no money in it, to pay for your drinking?”
Rudolfo coughed, and said: “Well, it wasn’t ALL for drink, or even mostly. And even then, it wasn’t all MINE. You see, I’ve been staying here a spell, and it IS a most glorious tradition to buy your audience a round when RUDOLFO is in town, whilst regaling them with ballads of those SPECTACUALR adventures which earned me fame and—”
Your raised an eyebrow.
“Well, perhaps not fortune, exactly, wot,” he finished lamely.
“Well WHATEVER your vices, get them sorted,” you admonished him. “Pay your own bloody debts, don’t play the beggar with your own CHILD.”
“But they won’t allow me to leave to continue my wok until I settle my tab here,” your father lamented, to which the bartender nodded and produced a rather authentic-looking orcish war-club from beneath the bar.
“Then get a job in town,” you told him. “You’re too old to be adventuring anymore, and you said it yourself-things are peaceful.”
“Well, hold on now!” he said, doffing his cap and placing a hand to his hear. “I heard tell of conflict with those black-skinned rapscallions to the south of us good and godly folk! And something of WERERATS and WERELIZARDS prowling these very streets, ey?”
“Right,” you said blandly, “the get a job as an exterminator or a militia-man.”
“They won’t hire a man of his age,” Izirina noted casually.
“Or with a criminal history,” Pearce added, earning a wince from your father with what seemed an accurate guess.
“I DID actually serve in a militia once,” your father said, as if to change the subject. “It was thirty-fove—nay, FORTY years ago, when you were but a twinkle in—”
“Don’t care,” you interrupted, turning back around. “I’m leaving. Don’t bother me again until you sort your life out, old man.”
It wasn’t that you felt NOTHING for the man or his offer—to meet with your other family, whoever they were—but you weren’t about to enable him or to get caught up the cockamamie schemes of a second parent who was as bad or WORSE than the first.
