The Ninth Blade

 

Approximately 4000 years ago, a Serpent Man sorcerer learned that being a master sorcerer, in a race of master sorcerers, wasn’t enough.  He found it necessary, as did many of his contemporaries, to empower guardian creatures, or necromantic armies, to protect his territory from his rapacious rivals.

 

This magi lived in the land of what is today called the Toltec people, and he ordered a great religious assembly during a week that his divinations and celestial observations had deemed most fortuitous, for his purposes anyway.  Hundreds of his human vassals were assembled to watch the falling star, a portent of their gods bloody favor.  But the calculations that they had been given where flawed by their living god, and the meteorite struck the midst of the celebration, striking them all dead in a tremendous sacrifice to the lord of the dead.

 

A team of artisans arrived at the holy site to cart the glowing stone away, and despite sickening and dying from the unwholesome death-energies it manifest, their corpses continued their masters bidding, and fashioned blades and talismans from the metal fragments they recovered.  The sorcerer did not know the word ‘radioactivity,’ but he recognized that the strange stone had properties that sickened and killed all around it, and he used his spells to protect himself and to bind the blades to a select caste of powerful warrior bodyguards that would enforce his will.

 

The most successful of his enchanted creations was known as the Ninth Blade, and was carried by his powerful half-breed son, a fearsome warrior in his own right, who only became more so when bound to the Ninth Blade, and able to tap it’s unwholesome power.

 

The blade was no protection from the cataclysmic earthquake that dropped that unholy empire into the earth, and heralded the eventual decline of Serpent Man rule.

 

3990 years later, the explorer James Fowler, an aging explorer turned graverobber and mercenary, discovered the sunken ruins of this Serpent Man temple-city deep in the earth below Guatemala.  His team of hardened ruffians began collecting ancient coin and artifacts to bring to the surface and sell to the highest bidder when they came under attack by the degenerate tribes of savage Serpent Man that still remained in this ancient place, aping their former glory and chanting words that no longer had any meaning to them.

 

The battle was a slaughter, on both sides, the automatic weapons causing bloody carnage, but the Serpent Men’s use of poison and traps, as well as their familiarity with the terrain, proving to be the tomb robbers undoing.  James ran out on his dying men, down a winding passageway that the Serpent Men seemed to have avoided during the melee, praying in the dark to whatever god or devil would listen to preserve his life.  He stumbled into a chamber that contained three aging Serpent Man priests, all but incapable of physical combat, and the Ninth Blade, sitting on a crude ‘altar’ of stone that the primitives had assembled for it.  They rose and did their feeble best to keep this softskin from the holiest of holies, and despite having lost his handgun in the mad run down the winding passageway, he managed to kill one of them by twisting it’s neck while they attempted to bear him to the ground.  He was bitten at this point, and staggered back as a sceptre of bone and animal skulls smashed across his face.  His blood flew across the chamber, and fell upon the Ninth Blade, which began to glow red.  He heard a faint chanting, and ignored it, seizing up the oddly-shaped weapon and slicing the advancing priest in half with a feeble stroke.  He stared in shock at the bloody blade, tingling in his hand like a thing alive, and at the corpse that had been sheared in half as effortlessly as a sheet of rice paper.  The chanting continued, and he looked to see that the third priest had fallen to its knees and was bowing and chanting, apparently to him.

 

Bewildered, he looked around to see that the other Serpent Men had finally caught up to him, but they also backed away and began to bow and chant the words of the elder priest.  It was at that point that he finally lost consciousness from shock and blood loss (and, he thought at the time, the venomous bite he had sustained, as he was unaware of the protective abilities of the Ninth Blade).  After awakening, he gathered his wits about him, and accepted the ‘hospitality’ of the superstitious savages, at first thinking to rule these simple creatures and exploit them, but deciding instead that he had to be away from them when he realized that the meat that they had been serving him during his time of disability was cut from his former allies.  He regained his health, if not his sanity, and left these creatures far behind, trusting to the power of the Ninth Blade to get him back to the surface.

 

At times, he sliced through fallen stone like butter, to carve his way past obstacles, and he quickly discovered that his own flesh had grown as strong as the strange stone of the Ninth Blade.  At some point in the last millennia, the radioactivity of the blade had faded, but it’s mystical properties remained potent, and he learned that as long as he retained a grip on the blade, he was nearly invulnerable to harm.  (This lesson came at cost, as he threw the Blade at a meddling Johnny Rocket, who managed to avoid it, and strike him unconscious while he was vulnerable.  It was in prison that he learned of another ability, to summon the blade to his hand.)  He quickly tied some of the leathery tassel that hung from the handle around his wrist, to ensure that the Ninth Blade could never fall far from his grasp.  Some months later, he learned to ‘slice’ his way across distances, a form of teleportation that he began to use in criminal enterprises.

 

He has been unsuccessful at robbing most banks, and is not patient or connected enough to handle jewelry stores or tech heists (although he has done some art heists, and has connections in the archaeological community to fence more ancient artifacts).  For petty cash, he sticks to armored car heists, choosing a vantage point near a drop-off point, teleporting into position and waiting for the ‘delivery.’  He then ‘slices’ his way into the van, preferably while one of the guards is out making a pick-up, takes a few bags of cash and ‘slices’ his way to his waiting getaway vehicle.  In one of these incidents, a guard sprayed him with pepper spray, and he gutted the man like a fish, once again as surprised as his victim at how easily the Ninth Blade tears through flesh and bone.  He resolved not to ever again deliberately use it on a person, but his resolve would not hold up in the face of a possible return to prison.

 

 

The Ninth Blade

Weapon +10 (Lethal, Extras: Energy Field (Radiation), Protection, Immunities (suffocation, aging, disease, cold, heat, suffocation, critical hits, pressure, poison, starvation), Teleportation.  Power Stunt: Returning (for a Teleport Device, allows the user to call it to hand from anywhere within Teleport range as a Half Action).  Total cost; 52 pp.

 

James Fowler: PL 11; Init +6 (+2 Dex, +4 Improved Initiative); Defense 17 (+5 base, + 2Dex); Spd 30 ft.; Atk +5 melee (+13L Ninth Blade or +3S punch), +5 ranged (+5L heavy pistol); SV Dmg +3, Fort +3, Ref +4, Will +1; Str 16, Dex 14, Con 16, Int 13, Wis 13, Cha 14. (26 pp, 25 pp)

Skills: Bluff +2, Climb +1, Demolitions +3, Drive +5, Gather Information +5, Hide +5, Intimidate +5, Knowledge (history) +2, Knowledge (geography) +5, Languages (Spanish, Portuguese and Italian), Listen +3, Move Silently +5, Open Lock +1, Search +5, Spot +2, Survival +5 (57 pp)

Feats: Improved Initiative, Assessment, Track, Surprise Strike, Lightning Reflexes (10 pp)

Powers: The Ninth Blade (see above, 52 pp)

Equipment: Heavy Pistol (5 pp)

 

175 pp