© Wizards of the Coast 1994
Otto was a bit ridiculous and he knew it. From his ears, which a sorcerer had turned into miniature angel wings some time ago, to his plaid skirt, Otto was an eccentric. Otto was ruthless; he was either a very tragic hero or an anti-villain and he was having trouble deciding which. Since no one in Otto's life was very heroic, he was leaning towards tragic hero, but really there was nothing in him indicating one way or another. Otto was a bit of a warlord, and his tribe was successful at pillaging and fighting, but really not so good at recruitment or propagation, having no women in the tribe and not really caring to add any. Sometimes boys or men asked to come with them, but really they didn't like to take those kinds of people on most of the time -- too bloodthirsty, usually kinda weird. Not interested in helping out the orphanages, and often not worried about robbing nuns. "Church hierarchy's money, not the nuns' money" fellas like that would say. Didn't make much difference to Otto. Nuns were the ones you had to threaten, and nuns were a strange lot, far too often willing to die for the churches' goods. No, you don't rob a nun. You especially don't hold up a nun. With a bow. At twenty yards. From a rooftop. Downright cowardly. You especially don't do away with her when she refuses to comply, Steven, you worthless git.
Moving on, Otto worked hard to be eccentric, and worked hard to be a tragic hero. He worked especially hard on the tragic part. Giving money to orphans and nuns and avoiding certain heists was the easy part, as Otto saw it, but if he wanted to be a true tragic hero, it was important to work hard to keep the tragedy around. Always difficult to keep doing the wrong thing. It wasn't that he had remorse, it was just that his life would have been a lot easier if he'd stopped robbing banks, stagecoaches, merchant wagons, ships, and trains, and travelers on the road who didn't stop at travel shrines and smell the roses. Not that all travel shrines had roses, it's just that people ought to be respectful of the Goddess and her shrines and the beauty she laid out for them. The hero part was easy.
Otto's tribe was a fairly strange one.
They had a twelve year old boy who was secure in his nature, liked to steal, but would prefer to make bows -- but with no war on, he couldn't make any good money that way. In those days men never paid for hunting bows, and the boy would have needed someone to pull the strings tight anyway.
There was an old man who was neither crazy nor incredibly wise or magical, but he knew how to use a sword. He too, had no particular issue with his shortcomings, and so he was simply an old man who knew how to use a sword and liked Otto, and didn't hate anyone else with them.
There was a young man, and this one was not in love with any woman, nor was he cocky or particularly solemn or good at cards or writing, or fantastic to talk to or particularly emotional or sensitive. The young man laughed a bit, cried never, and he could draw a bow and he liked the twang it made, and if he was hired to sit there and fire arrows at a brick wall all day his life would be happier than near any other in the world, but no one would pay you to shoot at a brick wall except in tournaments, and he was no good for tournaments, all those people, and not actually being a good enough shot to make money in any case, so he was on with Otto, shooting arrows at trees for practice when they made camp and taking the pay Otto could give and threatening to shoot arrows at people when Otto wanted him to, though to him it'd be not much different than hitting a more complicated brick wall, or a weak spot in that wall if he hit his mark, which he sometimes did, but not terribly often.
That made four of them, and they were eight, but the others they were nothing special same as these firsts, especially nothing to merit a description. The middle aged men didn't have vendettas or families, and they weren't orphans or rangers or naturalists or Druids or priests or even really rogues. There was no one who used a particularly distinctive weapon, and none of them except for Otto looked very remarkable, though one of the younger ones had a pony tail and one of the older ones a scar from something silly like a rat bite on his cheek that he played up as a wound from a bar brawl. Really if, when you exaggerate the cause of a wound, your best story is a bar brawl, you truly are simple and boring. Nobody was very hardened and they didn't resist or dislike Otto, but they weren't particularly happy where they were, but they weren't sad or mad or unhappy either. They wanted to be somewhere else, but it didn't have to be today or tomorrow, but maybe Thursday, weather permitting, but there was always next Thursday, and the tribe had been together, plus or minus a member or two, for about three years, more like twelve if you just counted Otto and two of the others. The boy of twelve they had picked up recently. One of the men about twenty five liked to read and sometimes he would read or recite stories by the fire, and another was very sure to always say thank you to whoever cooked the dinner and honestly that was as interesting as the tribe got.
Moving on, one Wednesday Otto's tribe of eight was hunched up behind a few large trees growing close together in the forest, blocked off from the road, and they heard someone coming and it was an escort, for who they couldn't be certain. Otto gave orders to break camp real quick now, ya hear boys. And the boys did break camp real quick now, but a sentry came up to them and asked them who their leader was and Otto stepped forward and told him we didn't mean to be botherin' no one none and we was just getting on our way and the scout was walking away when another scout came by and then there were two scouts and it was making Otto uneasy and one of the scouts reached for a paper out of his bag and the other looked at it and they looked at Otto who was watching them out of the corner of his eye and when he saw the recognition on their faces he pulled his crossbow and yelled to the young man who liked to shoot I'll take the bearded one and they shot two shots and two men fell and a boy and a man from Otto's group ran out to take the horses and the group moved off into the forest after they looted the scouts' bodies and took the wanted posters and prayed a prayer for those they had slain. It wasn't their fault really, but it wasn't otto's fault either and truth be told none of Otto's seven men and boys wanted to keep going without him, hey'd have probably disbanded and then maybe joined another band and other bands aren't so kind as Otto's band.
When they got a safe distance away they sketched the men and wrote down that they were scouts and put their outer garments which would identify them with the drawings and put them in a sack with the other similar items so that if they could figure out who the people were they could give their families some sort of payback for the lives cut short which they hadn't wished to cut short -- often the kinds of men whose pictures ended up in the bag were service men or bounty hunters or sometimes they were just farmhands who had a knack for magic and you just couldn't deal with people who had the knack, couldn't disarm them, so you had to put them out or kill them and there's no reliable way to keep a man knocked out so they killed the ones with magic.
Thursday came and went and no one left and they started another week of being a quite tragic band of heroes, or a quite anti group of anti-villains, and they hoped they were being tragic because they didn't want to be villains but if they were, that would be okay, because next Thursday they'd be out and they'd have money and they'd settle down and figure out what to do that wasn't looting and stealing and didn't have to involve killing. Like being in the war. We'll let you out on Thursday. Which Thursday. Does it matter, so long as you know it'll be a Thursday? Sure enough, Otto died on a Thursday, and them who had saved enough money settled down,and the rest went to anti-villains and from there to lackeys or full on villains or into no mans land or became rangers, and they were interesting, but they were no longer a group of misfit characters who couldn't decide between tragic heroes and anti-villains and really, wasn't that the most interesting thing about them?
"Otto's Tribe" Flash Fiction © Ben Clardy V
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
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