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
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 its
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 its 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.
As he has never stuck around to see what happens to a
victim of one of his attacks, he is only dimly aware that the blade causes
lingering wounds, a strange and lethal combination of fell curse and mystically
augmented radioactivity festering within the wound and causing further
degeneration of a target struck by the blade, sometimes killing a man days
after he was originally hurt.
Jim used to be a handsome man, and he still has a
commanding presence, ‘though his once muscular frame is now leaner, and his
strong-jawed face now taut and haggard. His once-bronzed and leathery skin now
is pale and hangs loosely, and his formerly sun-bleached hair had darkened back
to light-brown, with streaks of white at his temples, and is rarely clean, let
alone kempt. For a man whose body no longer ages, he shows more than his 45
years, and those who see him would never recognize the man he once was, but can
tell that it isn’t just age at work here, they are seeing a man who has been
used-up and beaten-down, but is somehow still alive, even if he looks like he’s
run long past his expiration date.
The power of the Ninth Blade sustains his body now, in a
state somewhere between life and death, and no longer needs eat, breathe or
fear other environmental hazards. More disturbingly, ‘vital’ shots to the heart
or lungs no longer seem to impede his body’s ability to function. He still
sleeps, and dreams of ancient ophidian civilizations fill his nights, causing
him to wake screaming, as he *knows* that he isn’t just dreaming, but actually
seeing a world before man descended from the trees, and he *knows* that the
cruel bloodthirsty sorcerers of this world long-dead see him as well as his
spirit wanders their world, and these too-clever monsters do not rest quietly…
The Ninth Blade (Jim Fowler)
PL 10 (112 pp)
Abilities: Str 16, Dex 14, Con
16, Int 14, Wis 12, Cha 14
[26 pp]
Attack: Melee +6, Ranged +6 [12 pp]
Defense: +6 (+3 flat-footed) [12 pp]
Initiative: +6
Damage: +3 hand to hand, +5 (penetrating) with The Ninth
Blade (Crit 17-20)
Saves: Toughness +3 (+14, 8 Impervious, with Blade in hand
and wearing undercover vest and leather jacket), Fort +3, Ref +2, Will +1 [0
pp]
Skills: Acrobatics 0 (+2), Bluff 6 (+8), Climb 2 (+5),
Computers 0 (+2), Concentration 0 (+1), Craft (structural) 1 (+3), Craft (all
others, untrained) 0 (+2), Diplomacy 0 (+2), Disable Device 4 (+6), Disguise 0
(+2), Drive 4 (+6), Escape Artist 0 (+2), Gather Information 4 (+6), Handle
Animal 0 (+2), Intimidate 4 (+6), Investigate 0 (+2), Knowledge (streetwise) 6
(+8), Knowledge (all others, untrained) 0 (+2), Language (English, native),
Language (French), Language (Portuguese), Medicine 0 (+1), Notice 4 (+5),
Perform (all untrained) 0 (+2), Pilot 0 (+2), Profession (actor) 2 (+4),
Profession (all others, untrained) 0 (+1), Ride 0 (+2), Search 4 (+6), Sense
Motive 4 (+5), Sleight of Hand 0 (+2), Stealth 5 (+7), Survival 4 (+5), Swim 0
(+3) [14 pp, 56 ranks in skills]
Feats: All-Out Attack, Assessment, Defensive Attack,
Diehard, Equipment 3, Improved Initiative 1, Jack-of-All-Trades, Minions 4
(five 30 pp Thugs, p 229), Power Attack, Sneak Attack 1
[15 pp]
Equipment: Heavy Pistol (+4 Ballistic damage, Crit 20, 40’ range, 8 EP), Undercover vest (+2 Toughness,
Subtle, 3 EP), Leather Jacket (+1 Toughness, 1 EP), Cell-phone (1 EP), Camera
(1 EP), Lock-release Gun (1 EP)
Powers:
Device 11 (The Ninth Blade, Dagger of radioactive
enchanted metal. Easy to lose. Strike 2 (Extra:
Disease, Penetrating, Poison, Power Feats: Incurable, Mighty, Thrown), Teleportation
3 (Extra: Portal, Flaw: Action 2 (standard action to open portal)), Protection
8 (Extra: Impervious), Immunity 13 (life support, hunger & thirst,
aging, critical hits), Bonus Feats: Improved Critical 3, Feature: Can summon it
to his hand from within 300’)
[33 pp]
Abilities 26 + Atk/Def 24 +
Saves 0 + Skills 14 + Feats 15 + Powers 33 = 112 pp