While boatman cheerfully washes his face, you puke the remaining contents of your stomach into the lakewater. By your feet, a striped orange-white kitten -- the boatman's -- chews on the remains of a forgotten fish-head, its rotten stench occasionally contributing to your queasiness. If you had known it was going to be like this you'd have braved the day's walk through the wooded trail -- or better yet, quit the damned guards entirely. The boat lurches again. There's nothing left to throw up but your body goes through the motions anyway. You never should have come here.

"Alright, there Hal?" says the boatman.

Your name, of course, is not Hal, it's Al. Alfred Blade, newly minted guard in service to the supreme Overlord Zorgon II. But you hold up your thumb in silence, no longer even having the energy to correct him.

"We're but a few minutes off. Ye can see the shelf. Look."

You slowly turn your head (still resting on the gunwale) towards the approaching shoreline. The shelf on which the village sits rises nearly two stories from the water. Some kind of black moss grows in large, perfect squares on the cliff-face, evenly spaced, like the hollows of an upturned bookshelf. The sight is so strange that you immediately right yourself and momentarily forget your own seasickness.

"Nightwort," says the boatman. "Ye'll smell it soon." The glee with which he says this puts fresh fear into your heart, but as you draw nearer you discover that the smell is actually quite pleasant. Something between pine and lemongrass. It relaxes you -- or perhaps it's the prospect of soon being on solid earth again. Regardless, it doesn't change the fact that you drew the short straw. No guard in his right mind would have willingly taken on this assignment -- and you hadn't, you were gunning for...

>The Guards Templar: Specialists in dispelomancy trained to combat organized and/or supernatural crime
>The Royal Guard: Personal guard of the royal family; an inherently political position
>Internal Operations: The few, the hidden, the reviled and the feared; the eyes and ears of the Overlord
>The Nightwatch: The chosen elites who venture outside the walls so that those within them can sleep safe at night