(Shark World) Courts of Justice

[Carnifex]

This is just a quick and probably poorly written little short story I kicked out this afternoon, inspired by the Shark World thread I didn't align the paladin or the Courts with any particular god, since I need to go back and read over them as well as the possibility that the Courts might be an organisation of good and lawful sea-dwellers of any religion.

Here goes:

Renoth shielded his eyes from the glare of the sun, peering over the rippling waters that spread out to the horizon in all directions. That was all he could see, just the water and the empty skies, and that was a sight he was glad of.

The slaver ship's hull was full of captives from the latest raid, and thus Renoth was constantly vigilant for pursuit and those seeking vengeance. Peering over the side of the ship to the water flowing below, he could see the shapes of the slaving crew's aquatic members cutting through the waves around the craft, a sight that assured him that all was safe below. With a splash the sea elf Garthra broke from the surface, grinning up at him as she waved an 'all clear' signal. The captain looked back up over the waters and grinned himself.

The settlement of Dar Manath had been easy pickings, a floating village of timbers, seaweed colonies and suchlike all lashed together to form a community for water-breathers and surface-dwellers alike. The wooden palisade had been no match for the slaver craft, ramming straight through it and disgorging warriors into the midst of the populace. Outcast dwarven smiths had worked for months on the Tsunami to plate its front and sides in an iron cladding, their technology ensuring the ship continued to float even with all that extra weight.

Below in the hull, the muffled groans and weeping of prisoners could occasionally eb heard over the crew and waves. Half of the slave quarters were full of water for those of the aquatic races, so the other half was incredibly damp and unpleasant for the humans and elves of Dar Manath whom the slavers nets had captured. Over a hundred in all were packed away down there, a good crop, so now all Renoth had to do was get them back to the harbour and sell them on. While the Tsunami could defend itself against real warriors he had a fear of sea dwellers or a military ship damaging it; with so much iron it would sink like a stone.

He absent-mindedly fingered the magic ring he wore. At least if that happened, the little trinket would keep him from going down with the rest of his men. None of them knwe of the ring; if they did, he didn't trust them enough not to steal it from him, even the fair-featured but cutthroat-minded Garthra.

He was broken from his musings by sudden activity around the ship, sea-elf pirates clambering up the rope netting that hung down from the crafts flanks along with cries of alarm. Sharks had been spotted nearby, keeping pace with the slaver ship off to starboard.

Sharks acting like that probably meant sahuagin.

Renoth grabbed a hook-bladed polearm from a rack on deck, yelling orders in a clipped, efficient manner. "Crows nest, check the waters for signs of disturbance! Pull up the rope nets once the sea elves are all back onboard, no sense in giving the sharkmen aid in boarding us! Keep your crossbows trained on the..."

He was cut off by a sight that simply left him speechless. From the nearby waters a dolphin shot upwards, outwards, arcing over the ship with a spraying trail of mulitcoloured droplets of water glimmering in the light like a rainbow. Gracefully it soared through the air, and through the glare of the sun the slavers could see it was changing...

By the time it hit the deck it was something else entirely, and the captain screamed frantically for the attack.

Standing over seven feet tall and powerfully muscled, the sahuagin warrior was clad in irridescent coral armour inlaid with complex designs of mother-of-pearl, each of its four arms gripping a gleaming silver trident. As men and sea-elves swarmed towards it, the arms blurred into a graceful dance of death, striking out with the tridents to send the attackers around it tumbling like ragdolls with brief sprays of crimson gore. Other warriors opened fire with crossbows, only to see the bolts slapped out the air with a trident or shatter harmlessly on the coral armour of the sea devil.

More cries of alarm alerted Renoth to the fact that other coral-armoured sahuagin were swarming up the side of the vessel, not four-armed mutants like their leader but easily enough over-powering his crew with an alarming discipline and efficiency. The human captain looked around the melee with increasing alarm as his crew was rapidly beaten into submission, not even moving from the spot and clutching onto the polearm for dear life.

Soon enough there was the clatter of weapons dropping on the deck as slavers surrendered. Their captain could only look around aghast at the scene, his attention suddenly drawn back to the four-armed leader as the massive thing loomed over him.

"Slaver, you have been judged." Its voice was like ten speaking at once, reverberating deeply and awe-inspiringly. The human could not help himself from trembling and trying to make himself look small and inconspicuous before what could only be a champion of one of the gods. "And you have been found guilty." It sounded disapproving, not angry or enraged, just stern. [font =aqua]"You will be punished according to the severity of your crimes."[/color]

It turned away then, and he was glad that the paladin's focus had been removed from him. He slowly began to edge towards the side of the ship, thinking to use the powers of his ring to let him escape from what was rapidly becoming a nightmare. His ship captured by some bunch of insane sahuagin holy warriors, and his crew... he watched as the leader gave orders, the slaves being led out of the hold and blinking confusedly in the sunlight. "What will happen to us? What is this punishment?" he demanded with as much pride and arrogance as he could still muster.

That chillingly calm gaze settled on him again. "These prisoners will be returned to their homes, from where they should never have been taken. The members of your crew who can survive in the water cannot be allowed to remain on the ship, since they would evade their punishment easily. We shall take them back with us to the Courts of Justice, where they shall be imprisoned." That made the sea-elven members of the crew feel a little more relieved, as they had expected to be slaughtered on the spot, but the human crew began to feel even more afraid of what their sentence might be.

"The rest of you shall be left on this craft."

Renoth blinked in confusion. Even with half his crew taken by the sahuagin, he could still get this ship back to harbour; the loss of half the crew and the hold of slaves was less that than his fear he might have lost his life. It seemed bizarre to imprison half the crew and let the rest go free.

But sure enough, the sahuagin were binding up the sea-elves - including Garthra who cursed and spat vituperously - and kindly leading the slaves down onto matts of buoyant seaweed for their trip back to Dar Manath. He couldn't help but smile with relief as the alst of the attackers leapt down into the water and only the four-armed paladin remained on deck.

"You're really going to just let us go? You got some holy command to leave us or something?" he sneered, feeling a little more assured now that once again it was just the one sahuagin on the deck and the human crew members were gathered around him.

The sahuagin snorted derisively. "Trust me, you shall wish we took you to the Courts for imprisonment. The sentence placed on this slaving crew was thus; the sea-dwellers came from our sea, but still despoiled it; as such we have the right to take them back into our hold and imprison them, to stop them harming the peoples of the oceans further. Of you land-dwellers, who came not from the sea and are thus not our responsibility, we leave you to the judgement of the sea herself."[/font]

With that he stabbed out a single trident to the mainmast of the slaver vessel. the slavers looked bemused for a moment before the trident pulsed with energy, sending cracks running throughout the great beam of wood before it fractured, shattered, splintered, and toppled over into the sea, the ropes and sails whipping wildly before hitting the waters.

Renoth suddenly realised the death-sentence that had been passed on them. They were to be at the mercy of the sea, without a means to move themselves and purely subject to the whims of the tides and waves. Most likely the entire crew would starve to death at sea over the course of several weeks - the supplies in the hold were only stocked with enough food for the short trip it took to acquire some slaves. Awed by the demonstration of power, no-one tried to stop the paladin as it strode over to the edge of the ship and dived into the sea, shape rippling and reforming once more into a dolphin that dove away beneath the waves.

The abandoned slavers looked out numbly at the sea-weed rafts slowly moving further away. A couple leapt over the edge to catch up with the slaves, even despite the fact that they could hardly expect a warm welcome from their former captives; with a last cry each was pulled under the waves by dark shapes that prowled beneath. It was clear that everyone on the ship was there for good, until they died or the sea decreed that they be cast ashore.

Weighed down with despair, many just slumped down where they had stood, amid the corpses of their former companions who had fallen to the sahuagin during the battle. Renoth just continued to stare out at the departing rafts, fingering the ring again. Its powers meant he was still safe, and the sahuagin couldn't have known of it; to the human, the idea of leaving his crew to starve was no real problem if it meant he survived. He'd leave when the others were asleep, probably this very night, and return to Darkshore to rebuild a crew.

Not for slavers this time though. He kept the image of that paladin's face in his mind, thought of these 'Courts of Justice' that tried to patrol the waterways and keep pirates and slavers suppressed. This time he'd be hunting them instead, for revenge.

 

[trentonjoe]

Outstanding!

I think we have our first hero and villian!

God, I love this good and evil stuff!

 

[Crothian]

You're hired!!

Very well done. We only have five gods, none that are of justice, but any one of them could have gotten that power during the great sacrifice, or he the Paladin could be of a dead god of Justice hoping to somhow bring him back.

 

[drowdude]

Good stuff.

Although, I still have trouble envisioning Sahuagin as being good-aligned.... but this helps out with forming the image immensely

 

[Crothian]

Good stuff.

Although, I still have trouble envisioning Sahuagin as being good-aligned.... but this helps out with forming the image immensely

Exactly. Remember we at Shark World Inc want to expand upon the ideas of many underwater races and show them as both good and ewvil, like the rest of the traditional races.

 

[Carnifex]

Some more detailing on the Courts of Justice - tell me what you think of it:

The Courts of Justice:

Wherever pirates prey on innocents, shark god worshippers slaughter the helpless and the forces of destruction seek to undo the progress of civilisation, the Courts of Justice move to counter them. The Courts are both a place, and an organisation, a self-proclaimed policing force of the waves.

The actual Courts of Justice themselves are a complex of coral buildings far below the surface of the ocean, located in the Karakan sea. The city is a truly awesome example of undersea architecture, and was not constructed by its present occupants; it is believed to have already existed when the meteors struck the world, but no trace of the original builders remains.

Now, it is a bustling hive of activity for the agents of the Courts of Justice. It is the hub of the organisations activity, from where they plan raids to hunt down pirates, slavers and raiders. It is where all the reports from Court spies and a vast amount of intelligence data that they acquire, is collated and analysed. It is the marshalling ground for their forces and the bastion of their power.

The Courts have a clear stated aim; to bring justice to those deserving of it. Unfortunately, many disagree with their methods. Far from being a fair trial, a judgement is handed down when agent reports bring a criminal to the attention of the organisation high-ups, who then hold a ceremony to decide what punishment should be ascribed. A war party is then dispatched to bring the offenders to justice; sea-dwellers usually face death or imprisonment in the prison-tunnels that riddle the rock below the city, while surfacers are usually cast adrift at sea and left at the whims of the tides. This rather brutal method of policing is very effective and certainly appreciated by those who would otherwise suffer the depredations of the pirates, but many accuse the Courts of being arbitrary and not just at all. In addition, other undersea powers tend to dislike Court warriors intruding on their lands.

Outside the reach of their patrols, the Courts still have some means of furthering their aims. The first is bloodhound agents, effectively Court assassins sent out to eliminate individuals whom the magistrates feel need to be dealt with but whom they cannot touch openly due to the target being, for instance, within the walls of the marid trade-city. In that situation, sending in two dozen soldiers to eliminate the target would have the kind of repercussions that the Courts could not afford. In addition, Court spies and agents often infiltrate the lower echelons of administrations and undersea governments.

This means that the Courts are perhaps one of the most informed organisations under the waves, to the point where rumour says the Magistrates know what the marid padishah had for breakfast (untrue, since the Court spies are no where near that skilled and besides, marids dont have the same kinds of concepts about food as mortal races).

The Courts of Justice are effectively a self-sufficient community, and as yet the small population has only reoccupied a small part of the ancient settlement. They have however discovered a network of tunnels and caves beneath the rock which they use as a prison complex. Recently, the Courts have started to take on a new role though; they have entered into agreements with some nearby cities over criminals. While the criminals are judged elsewhere, they are then handed on to the Courts to serve their sentence. This is increasing the respect shown towards the Courts from being irritating fanatics and meddlers to a useful place to throw unwanted convicts. Rumour says that the magistrates have begun to set slaves to work clearing the as yet unoccupied areas of their city and exploring the twisting tunnels below.

The membership of the courts is a very mixed bag, consisting of sea elves, sahuagin, water genasi, marids and a whole array of other beings. Many are agents who work in their respective home communities as spies to supply the Courts with information, but since the setting up of the Courts home base in the ancient city many years ago they have gained an indiginous population of followers, although as yet small. Most of the inhabitants of the Courts are either prison warders, warband soldiers or clerks processing the influx of agent reports.

Sraelas (LG male sahuagin Pal 10/Divine Agent 3) is the leader of the warbands that scour the Karakan sea and its furthest reaches, and is heavily involved in the assignment of Court assassins to hunt down those whom the magistrates percieve as a threat. One of the main reasons this causes him to have many critics is because he is in fact a paladin, but the four-armed sahuagin mutant dismisses all accusations of heavy-handedness with the words "I serve Justice, and in these oceans Justice sometimes has to be applied with force." An incredibly charismatic leader and excellent tactician, the paladin is known for wielding four magical tridents simultaneously, including Shipslayer, a magical weapon capable of easily sundering the hull of a ship. More than one pirate vessel has gone down with all hands thanks to Shipslayer. Notably, when asked which deity he serves, Sraelas always states "I serve justice," despite the fact that there is purportedly no living deity with that portfolio. The fact that he clearly manifests divine powers and is obviously under the favour of some god makes sages suggest that either his strength of belief is so strong that it has connected with whatever spark remains of a slain deity, or - by critics - that in fact he has been duped by some darker power who masquerades as another god and manipulates the paladin like a puppet.

Ghendramak (NG male sea elf Wiz 15) is the unofficial head of the organisation, unofficial only because there is no post within the Courts of leader. It is believed that in fact he is the original founder of the organisation; the wiry sea elf is certainly of some age, and it was he that enlisted the paladin Sraelas to the cause. It seems he has grand plans for the Courts, though exactly what they may be is unclear.

Turani (LG female zoveri Brd 6) is what many see as a clear evidence that the powers of God favour the actions of the Courts; she is a zoveri, a celestial being from the heavens with the upper torso of a beautiful woman and the lower torso becoming like that of an octopus, an array of tentacles. She has a surprisingly keen mind for espionage and suchlike, and is heavily involved in the Courts covert operations.

Additional Hooks:

- The Courts certainly acquire a great deal of sensitive material from other organisations - many wonder what they really plan to use it all for other than just catching criminals. There are hints that they actually plan overt operations againts destructive cults and shark-god worshippers.
- Who knows how deep the tunnels beneath the Courts go?
- The Courts have recovered a number of bizarre magical objects and technology from the city as they spread out to reoccupy it.
- Some say the Courts have already lost sight of their original objective - justice - and are already becoming more like the other cults, organisations and suchlike of the seas.
- The surfacer city of Darkshore has already been razed twice by Court warbands. Many land-dwellers want proof that there was any reason other than a chance to acquire loot behind both attacks.

 

[trentonjoe]

I really like this. I would like to see Darkshore developed.

I like you. Trentonjoe is so happy. I must use short sentences.

Good work.

 

[Carnifex]

Yeah, I think I'll start working on Darkshore soon, as well as what Renoth the slaver is currently up to

 

[trentonjoe]

Yeah, I think I'll start working on Darkshore soon,

I don't know if we are planning geography yet but I would like to see Darkshore about 200 miles away from the Artic Elf Kingdom. This way I could have my Wave Runner Tribe have access to it.

I was planning on having them be the remains of a formerly great civilization.

Maybe Darkshore could be one of their former cities that they abandoned?

Maybe only a few of the elders of the tribe and city know this?

Would you like to work around/with that?

It is okay if you don't.

 

[Carnifex]

I'll see whether I can work some links in there - shouldn't be too hard.

I've invented an area called the Karakan sea, no set limits or definitions of it but its the place where both the Courts of Justice and Darkshore'll be. The Karakan sea probably wont be that big an area, so positioning Darkshore about 200 miles from an arctic area should be possible.