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Message: <blockquote data-quote="ConnorSB" data-source="post: 1287495" data-attributes="member: 14273">"A Bold Beginning"Espania’s people were as devout as they come, a cold and unforgiving populace that shunned strangers and abhorred change. Madrid was their capital, and the elves of that place were in all things more extreme than their provincial cousins. It was no surprise, therefore, that misfits had hard lives. As extreme as their peers were in their faith, so were pariahs in their general action and demeanor. Alex and Alexandria were perfect examples.    Unlike the typical elven family, they were orphans, without kin of any kind. And kin was paramount in Espania- without family you were a vagrant not even worthy of the boots that kicked you. Their childhood was a hard one, always running, always stealing, and never safe. When Alex had just reached manhood, he was pressed into the Armada. Two years he served, before the ship he was enslaved to finally returned to Madrid and he could find his sister.    The voyage had changed him, and not for the better. True, he fell in love with the sea, and was entranced by all it offered- the smells, the swells, the ships full of plunder. But these wonders were tarnished by his enforced company- the devout officers of the armada and their clerical overseers. Every day was prayer service, and every object on the ship was stamped with the seal of the Queen of the Winds. It may have been the most holy ship in the world, but for Alex it was a malicious overseer, an unruly beast that bit the hand that fed it. He grew to hate the church, and the armada, and even his own country. Everything Espania stood for was, for him, a joke, a lie, and a fraud.    And so it was no surprise that when he returned to his sister, he had already planned the greatest heist they had ever performed.    Alex and Alexandria were going to rob the High Church of Madrid of their most important relic. Notice that he did not say holy, for the Book of Teachings was in no way important to Alex. No, in his travels he had learned what truly rule Espania. It was not the Queen of the Winds: it was her bureaucracy. And so he and Alexandria were going to steal the Book of Accounts- the tome in which all transactions were recorded. Every bribe, every tithe, every payment for every sin committed by every important person, and every unimportant person, for the last decade or ten. It was a huge tome, and it was to be theirs.Alex’ mind was set upon this course, and soon so was Alexandria’s. It would happen that very night.</blockquote>

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