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Who made Pelor?

Dree put the flask and ointment back in her pouch, and put the cloth in another one. Then, she produced a jar of water to wash her hands.

Pulling the sheet over Father’s sleeping form, she retreated from the bedroom, ducking again in the low doorway, and taking the curtain from Annette’s unresponsive fingers to close it. She went to the front door and said some things quietly to Usen, who nodded and left. Finally, she went to the table in the middle of the room, pulled Annette’s stool from under it, and sat down.

“How long since he was wounded?” she asked.

“A month.” Mother turned away and busied herself at the hearth, glancing at the baby in the corner. As usual, he had arranged some sticks and wood chips into a battle scene, and was softly babbling to them about what they were doing. Mother rubbed her hands distractedly on her apron, and smoothed an errant hair.

“He’s a strong man,” Dree said. “The infection would have killed a weaker before now.”

Lisa wasn’t sure, but she thought Mother smiled briefly at this compliment.

“The medicine I used will help, but the wound was untreated for a long time,” Dree continued. “I don’t know if he’ll ever walk without a limp unless we can get him some better healing.”

“You’ve already done so much, my lady,” Mother said. Lisa saw her glance at the gold coins, still sitting on the table. They were not enough to pay for a healing spell, but they would help in so many other ways.

Dree smiled calmly, and opened one of the pouches that lined her belt. Somehow, she pulled a toy sheep, bigger than the pouch, out of the mouth of the pouch. The sheep was stuffed and soft, and may have been compressed somewhat, but Lisa still stared with her mouth open.

Annette didn’t hesitate, but ran over to Dree with her arms held out. “What’s his name?” she asked excitedly. Baby Joachim turned to see what the fuss was, and jumped to his feet to fight his sister for the toy.

Dree held the sheep just out of reach of Annette’s jumping, and pulled a second sheep out of the pouch with her other hand. Then, she handed one of the toys to each of the children.

“I don’t know his name,” she said softly. “All I know is that he is a powerful warrior for life.”

“I’ll call him Pelor!” Annette announced, lifting her toy over her head with both hands.

“No, don’t do that,” Dree cautioned sternly, causing Lisa to prick up her ears. Something about the way she had said it made even Annette pay attention, while Mother turned from her cooking to listen.

“I don’t know his name,” Dree repeated, “but I know that Pelor works for him.”

The shock that rippled through the little house was almost visible. Joachim didn’t understand, but Annette was amazed, Mother was alarmed, and Lisa was scandalized. Pelor was the great god. Even Beory had been revealed by his light, although he hadn’t made her. He was the father of the other gods.

Dree calmly waited until she thought that they were ready to listen again. “The sheep is a symbol,” she said. “Just as the disk that Lisa wears is a symbol.” Lisa’s right hand moved self-consciously to cup the symbol of Beory that she wore around her neck.

“When great Pelor shines,” Dree continued, “he can burn the skin of the laborer in the field. His light destroys the undead and nourishes the plants. His path in the sky tells us when to sleep and when to rise. But even Pelor came from another place, according to the stories.”

Lisa nodded. She didn’t know a story that explained where Pelor had come from when he came into the darkness overseen by Tharizdun and revealed Beory with his light.

“There is a god who is greater – as much greater than Pelor as Pelor is than the Hopping Prophet.” Annette giggled, thinking of the goggle-eyed prophet who ranted about human superiority. “There is a god who made Pelor, as the stories say that Pelor made Rao and Allitur.”

Lisa gasped at the thought of a god that powerful. Dree continued.

“If Pelor burns us without meaning to,” she said, “simply because he is so powerful, you can imagine what would happen to the mortal who encountered the god who made Pelor.”

Lisa imagined a being of such incredible power that Pelor became sun-burned in his glow. In her mind’s eye she saw the world engulfed in flames – even the rocks melting and burning in the intense heat. Dree nodded, as though she could see inside Lisa’s head.

“This god is not only powerful, but he is also wise and good,” Dree said. “After all, he gave us Pelor, and the other good gods to care for us. Since these gods care for us, the one who made them must love us also. But he is too mighty to show himself in all of his strength. If he did that, we would all die. Instead, he shows himself as a little lamb.” Lisa hadn’t noticed, so engrossed had she been with her inner vision, but Dree had produced a third sheep toy, and she was holding it tenderly.

“And if even a lamb is too frightening for some,” Dree said, “this lamb has been killed.” She turned the toy to show where it was clumsily stitched closed with bright red thread.

“This is the tenderness and gentleness of the god that I serve,” Dree continued. “He loves your family. He loves your father so much that he helped me to notice Lisa at the temple of Beory, so that I could come and help you here. He rescued me from the slave pits in the Pomarj, after the rest of my family had been killed by slavers. And the power of that little lamb –” she pointed at the sheep that Joachim was playing with “– can destroy undead in the hands of someone who believes.”

Joachim reacted to this news by using the sheep toy to send the sticks and wood chips of his armies flying. Annette was staring into the silly eyes of the toy, as though she would read its thoughts. Mother had turned back to the hearth. Lisa thought she knew what her mother was thinking. “Religion is all well and good for those who have the time and money for it,” was her general attitude, although she allowed Lisa to help at the temple when she could.

“Lady Dree,” Lisa said, “if your god is so powerful, why are there evil things, like undead and the dark god?”

Dree smiled at the question, but not as though it were a foolish one. “Why is there evil, if good is so powerful?” she asked. “Well, I like to think of it this way. If evil were the great force of the universe, there would be nothing but evil. In the Old One’s lands to the north, all that is good has been stamped out. So we know that evil is not the great force.

“Some people think that this means that good is also not the great force. After all, why would good not stamp out all that is evil? The answer is that we are all evil.”

There was a gasp of protest from the hearth, while Annette cocked her head on one side as though to help her understand. Lisa thought she had begun to understand already, however.

“As an example, when you go to the market, you tell the seller that you can’t possibly pay his price, and he must come down. Now, you don’t have a lot of money, but I know that for certain things, you would pay the seller’s price if you had to.

“At the same time, the seller tells you that he could not possibly reduce his price, or his family will starve. You know that this is not true, for he has reduced his price many times, and his family continue to be well fed.

“It’s all a kind of game, of course, and no one means much of anything by it, but it’s evil all the same.”

“Because it’s lying,” Lisa said.

“Yes, that’s true,” said Dree, “but it’s also selfishness. It’s a willingness to make the other person do with less so that I can have more. That’s greed.”

Lisa nodded slowly. She thought about the times she had come home, filled with pride at having reduced a merchant’s price below what the normal fee was. Now she felt ashamed.

“If the great god were to destroy all of the evil,” Dree said, “there would be nothing left. Also, if he forced us to love him, that wouldn’t be much of a true love. And so, he is gentle and patient, and he works through lesser beings like me…”

“And like Pelor,” Lisa said, understanding dawning.

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Beory’s Choice

Lisa never told Annette about the dragons. How could she? How would the little girl believe her? The two men had taken the dragons south, away from town, while the winged boat on wheels drove into Hochoch with the woman, the halfling woman, and a man that Lisa hadn’t noticed before on the front seat. The halfling man who had casually risen into the air had come back down and was sitting in the back of the wagon on top of all sorts of boxes, bags, bales, and crates. Lisa saw the top of a cooking tripod protruding in one place, and there were several cookpots hanging on the outside of the boat – er, wagon.

Once the laundry had dried, Lisa and Annette folded it up into the basket, and made their way back home. Mother was glad to see them back, and Lisa helped her to turn Father to put the clean sheets back under him, getting some fresh straw to replace the soiled. Once that was done, and the girls had cleaned up after lunch, there were other chores, and so until bed.

It was two days until Mother told Lisa, “You’ve been a big help this week. Why don’t you go to the temple? It is Godsday, after all.”

Lisa didn’t hesitate. She was already wearing her best clothing — the other outfit was for field work and things of that sort — so she told Annette where she was going and left the house at a run. The other members of the family worshiped the Old Gods in their fashion, but Lisa never tired of going to the temple to see the rituals and hear the teaching. She tried to think if it was a special feast day, or if it would be a “normal” Godsday, but she couldn’t remember.

Arriving at the doors, she decided it must be a “normal” day. Most of the seats were empty, and the priestess of Beory was going through the liturgy half-heartedly, knowing that there was little enthusiasm among the little crowd gathered.

Lisa’s attention wandered. It was the story of how Nerull killed Obad-hai and hung him on the tree. The way she told it, Lisa knew that it would end before the part about Ehlonna planting him to be grown (born?) again in the spring. Some days they told the whole story, and some days only part of it.

She started looking at the other people in the seats. Most of them she knew, even to their names, for they were neighbors and the most faithful in attending Godsday services. There were a few strangers. One was a small Bakluni man, almost hidden in his big turban and flowing robes. She wondered how well he understood the story, the way his head bobbed around. There were three halflings that were talking to one another in hushed tones – politely enough, she supposed, but the way they were quietly laughing, she thought they weren’t paying too much attention.

One woman caught Lisa’s eye. She was plainly dressed in a light brown robe, almost like a priestess of some sort, and she was listening very closely to everything the priestess of Beory was saying. She didn’t seem “enthralled”, as though she was hanging on every word. Rather, it almost seemed to Lisa that the woman was evaluating the story, checking to see if it was correct.

With a bit of a thrill, Lisa realized that the woman she was studying was the one who had been on the ferry. She glanced around to see if she recognized any of the others from that group and was startled to notice a man leaning against the wall of the temple.

This man was in the shadow of a support column, and standing so still that she thought for a moment he might be a statue. He was clad in armor from head to toe, including a helmet that covered his face completely. A long cloak completed the outfit. There was no tunic to show allegiance to a lord or any other marking like that. Lisa decided that he was a mercenary or sell-sword, but his attention seemed to be on the woman in the brown robe.

About this time, Lisa realized that the priestess had finished the story, and had begun one of the lesser litanies. Lisa stumbled over the words, distracted as she was by the strange woman and stranger man. Finally, the service was over and she moved to the front to give an offering. It wasn’t much, for her family didn’t have much to give, and Lisa made sure to contribute only from her personal funds. When she turned around after receiving the priestess’ blessing, the woman from the ferry and the strange mercenary were gone. The three halflings greeted her jovially, each holding a small money bag as they went forward to the priestess. Lisa returned their greeting automatically and hurried away from the altar.

She puzzled over it in her own mind, but she wanted to find the strangers. When she emerged from the temple into the morning light, she scanned the street, but couldn’t see them anywhere. Somewhat dejected, she sat down on the temple steps and leaned against a column.

Why was she so interested in the strangers, she wondered? Was it because of the dragons? Was it because of the man who so casually had cuffed and tugged on the dragon? It might even have been something to do with the strange boat-cart, or the halfling who flew. Perhaps it was just the thought of strange, exciting people coming from the Dim Forest on mysterious business.

As she was mulling over all of these thoughts, she heard the priestess say, “You’ve given me much to think about,” and then there were steps on the stones by the threshold. She looked up to see the woman from the ferry lifting the hood of her robe to cover her long, black hair as she exited the temple.

“Beory warm and Pelor’s light guide you,” Lisa said, rising to her feet and curtsying awkwardly.

The woman turned to her and smiled. “The one who made them welcome you,” she responded.

Lisa was shocked. This was not one of the normal responses to the religious greeting. Beory was the earth mother. She made everything, with Pelor, when they danced in the new light Pelor had brought. She looked up into the calm, dark eyes of the strange woman, who seemed to be waiting for Lisa’s thoughts to clear. About then, she realized that the mercenary from the church had moved up right behind the woman, and the fear must have shown in her eyes, for the woman glanced over her shoulder and then looked back, smiling.

“My name is Dree,” she said, “and this is Usen. He is my protector.” Taking Lisa by the hand, Dree led her down the steps of the temple and to a nearby tavern that had tables set out in the square. Dree guided Lisa to a seat and sat down next to her while Usen stood between them and and the square, the helmet turning this way and that as he surveyed the small groups at the scattered tables.

Lisa was overwhelmed. She had never sat at a tavern like this, although she thought her father had. She hoped the woman wouldn’t think her rude if she didn’t order anything, for the only money she had brought was the half-copper she had left in the temple offering.

Dree caught the attention of the serving girl and ordered two short beers. Lisa shrank down in her chair when the girl looked her way, and the wench returned to the tavern with Dree’s order. When Lisa looked up again, Dree was calmly staring at her.

“Are you new to Hochoch?” Lisa finally asked, holding fast to her courage.

Dree nodded. “We arrived on Sunday,” she said.

“So, where are you from?”

Dree laughed, a musical sound. “I’m originally from the Principality of Ulek,” she said, “and Usen is from the Pomarj.”

Lisa’s eyes must have goggled. She knew the Uleks were far away on the other side of the Rushmoors, and the Pomarj was even farther than that.

“I’ve only been to Leilam’s Orchard,” she said. “That’s in Gran March, but they talk just the same as we do. Father took us to a festival there before …” She broke off, fearing that she had said too much.

The beers arrived, and Dree pushed one of them over to Lisa, rather than giving it to Usen. Lisa gulped.

“I’m sorry, ma’am,” she said, “I came out without any money today.”

Dree smiled gently. “That’s alright,” she said. “I have plenty.” Lisa looked again at her.

The robe was plainly woven, but of good quality. It looked like undyed sheep’s wool, although the sheep near Hochoch were a different color. She had no ornaments – no rings on her fingers or bangles on her wrists. She didn’t even have any pins in her hair.

Lisa glanced at Usen, and saw the glint of rubies from the pommel of his sword. He, at least, had some of the markings of wealth, and she thought that his armor must be somewhat costly too, though it was a different style than what the soldiers in Hochoch wore.

She picked up the beer and sipped it, feeling more at ease as her stomach responded to the wholesome drink.

“What’s your name?” Dree had hardly sampled her beer, but was looking intently into Lisa’s face.

“I’m Lisa,” the girl replied, taking another drink to avoid saying anything more.

“I noticed that you came to the temple alone,” Dree commented. “You mentioned your father. Is he still living?”

Lisa gulped. She had not wanted to talk about her father. “Yes,” she said. “He’s alive.” Perhaps there was something in her tone of voice that communicated the darker truth, that he was not well.

Dree nodded. “And your mother?” Her head was cocked on one side as she waited for Lisa’s reply.

“Oh, Mother is fine!” Lisa said in a rush, taking another drink of the beer.

“Do you have any siblings?”

Lisa wasn’t sure where all of these questions were leading, but at least she could talk about her siblings without worrying about complications. “Bobby is apprenticed to a carpenter over by the Town Gate,” she said. “I’m next, and then Annette. Baby Joachim is only three.”

Dree nodded. “Are the others working this Godsday?”

Lisa paused. “Well, I think Bobby works all the time. I don’t see him much because he’s always busy with his carpenting. Annette is helping mother at home, but I think she’s just mostly playing with the baby.” Dree’s calm face was like a forest pool that quietly absorbed everything Lisa said without showing a ripple of response.

“And your father?”

Lisa’s face burned, and she thought it was unfair of Dree to ask her questions like this. She hadn’t asked for a beer, and she didn’t feel that she ought to owe Dree answers to personal questions. Who was Dree, anyway, a stranger from Ulek?

“He… He can’t work.” Lisa studied her fingers, wrapped around the porcelain mug on the weather beaten wooden table top.

“Can the priests of Beory do nothing for him?”

Lisa looked up. There was care and compassion in Dree’s face. Looking back down at the mug, Lisa said, “We don’t have the money to ask them.”

Dree glanced at Lisa’s mug. It was basically empty, since she had drunk to keep from talking too much, and Dree drained her own in a single draught. Then, leaving a gold coin on the tabletop, she stood and held out a hand to Lisa.

“I’d like to meet your family,” she said.

“Are you a priest?”

“I am, although I have no healing magic,” Dree replied, anticipating Lisa’s thoughts. “I do have some skill as an apothecary, though.”

Lisa didn’t know how to respond, but Dree had been very nice so far, and although Usen was vaguely menacing, he hadn’t actually done anything frightening. She led the two strangers through town to the cramped neighborhood where her family lived.

When Lisa’s mother heard the door open, she said, “Oh, there you are. If you can give me a hand with the sheets I’ll take them down and wash them.” She stood and turned from the small hearth as she finished talking, and stood mutely, staring at the two strangers behind her daughter.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t realize Lisa had brought company. How may I serve you?”

Dree nudged Lisa out of the way, where she had been standing in the doorway, and pulling her hood down off of her dark hair, she bowed to Lisa’s mother.

“My name is Dree Dantreyuss,” she said, “and I am a priestess of the God above all gods. I met your daughter at the temple of Beory in town.” She glanced around the cramped common room, the bundles of herbs hanging from the rafters and everything taking just a little more room than was available. “I don’t know, specifically, what your prayers have been,” she continued, “but I know that they have been heard. I don’t know how they will be answered, but I know that I have been sent to you as part of the answer.”

As she was speaking, Dree moved gracefully into the room, and Lisa saw that two gold coins appeared on the table where her hand passed. Mother was too stunned to notice that, her eyes seemed fixed on Dree’s face.

Finally finding her voice, she said, “My lady is gracious, but we have no money for temple services.” She spoke huskily, and her eyes were downcast on the floor.

“Did Lisa-bones finally come back from the temple?” a saucy voice asked as Annette slid down the ladder from the loft-space. She whirled around to tease Lisa some more and froze as she saw Dree standing in the middle of the room.

“Who are you?” she said in a moment, dancing over to shut the door, and stopping again when she saw Usen standing in the street.

Dree turned to follow the little girl’s movement, and Lisa saw a big smile on her face. Annette had that affect on most people outside the family.

“You must be Annette,” Dree said. “I’m Dree. I came to visit you because I want to meet your father.”

“He’s in his room,” Annette announced, cheerfully, and before their mother could say anything, she had danced over to the doorway at the back of the room and pulled the curtain to one side.

“Annette!” Their mother finally found her voice. “You shouldn’t — I’m sorry, ma’am.” Mother’s face was a mask of anguish as she sought the appropriate way to avert this catastrophe, but Dree ignored the obvious cues and ducked her head as she moved into the little bedroom.

The room stank of infection and a used chamber pot, and the small window let only a little light through the greased parchment that covered it. Dree went directly to the side of the bed and lifted the tangled sheets from Father’s body. Lisa, peering through the small doorway, could see that Father’s nightshirt had twisted around and was hiked around his waist, exposing him. The wound on his thigh was open again, and blood and pus oozed out, soiling shirt and sheet.

Dree knelt by the bed and reached into a pouch at her side. Although the pouch was quite small, hardly more than a purse, she removed quite a large piece of cloth from it, and then a small pot which proved to contain an ointment. Using one end of the cloth, she cleaned the wound and then smeared ointment on it. Through the process, Father lay motionless, his glazed eyes looking past her at the wall.

Finally, Dree produced a small flask from her pouch, and she held it to Father’s lips and told him to drink. He did, and suddenly relaxed in a way he hadn’t done for weeks. Eyes closing, he rolled onto his back and his steady breathing showed that he had gone to sleep.

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Hiccoughs in Hochoch

In the west, the sunrise touched the distant mountains with rose, and their snowy peaks seemed to glow in the fresh morning air. The streets were still in shadow, though, as Lisa and her little sister picked up the basket of clothes after carefully closing the door behind them.
Annette danced around Lisa as the older girl faced the big basket and finally nodded.

“Okay, ‘Net”, she said. “Help me get this up.” The last word ended in a squeak as Lisa hiccuped.

Annette giggled. “I’m not going to help you,” she said saucily, pausing in her dance just a moment.

“Annette!” Lisa’s frustrated complaint ended, again, in a squeak.

“I’m just teasing you,” Annette said, sticking out her tongue. “You need someone to scare you to get rid of your hiccups.”

Lisa sighed and hiccuped, gripping the sides of the basket and bending her knees. Annette grabbed the far side, and together they lifted the basket up to Lisa’s head where she struggled for a moment to get the balance, frustrated by the little shudders that shook her body as the hiccups came again and again.

She had hardly gotten the basket balanced when Annette released any hold she had on the basket and began dancing around her again.

“Lisa and Jakob, sitting in a tree…” the little girl began to sing.

Lisa sighed, but smiled at her sister’s energy. Annette never seemed able to sit still for more than a moment. She was more like a butterfly than a girl in some ways, flitting here and there, never resting long. A shudder passed through her with another hiccup and her hand flew up to make sure the basket was still balanced, but she needn’t have worried. This was a task she had practiced for many years, and even with the involuntary shaking, the basket would stay where it belonged. She started to walk down the street east, towards the river.

As the girls made their way through town, doors and windows began to open to one side or another of them as people opened shops or came out on their own chores. Mrs. Biltmore came hobbling down her little alley, as bent and crooked as the stick she leaned on, or the alley itself.

“Good morning, Mrs. Biltmore,” Lisa hicced, bending ever so slightly at the knees in courtesy.

“Good morning, young thing,” Mrs. Biltmore replied, peering at the girls to make sure they were who they sounded like. “Goodness, but I can’t see the one that’s flitting around so much,” she remarked. “That must be Annette!”

Annette giggled, and gave the old woman a hug that might have knocked her off her feet. “Now, you stop that,” the old lady scolded, and then looked up at the basket looming on Lisa’s head.

“It can’t be wash day already!” she remarked, her cloudy eyes fixed on the large dark shape hovering over Lisa.

Hic. “The baby’s been sick,” Lisa informed her, “and papa’s wound opened up again, so the sheets are (hic) nasty.” Her neck ached each time her body jerked and the basket shifted, just a little.

“Well, don’t let me keep you,” Mrs. Biltmore said, pressing a half-copper at Annette, who didn’t see because she was just dashing across the road to try to catch a cat.

“Good day to you,” Lisa said, and she continued down the road towards the river gate.

With the delay, she wasn’t surprised that the entire steeple of the temple of Beory was lit with the sunshine before they got near the docks. When they could finally see the Realstream, he had already risen above the edge of the Dim Forest, escaping the mists that always seemed to gather there, and was shining brightly on the two sisters.

Annette rolled her eyes when Lisa didn’t turn right, to the nearer part of the shore, but went left. Past the fishing docks, past the ferry landing, Lisa finally found the part of the bank she wanted. She had explained to Annette a hundred times that if you washed the clothes downstream of the fishing docks it took much longer, as you were always cleaning fish scales out of the clothes, but the little girl thought it was a lot of pointless walking.

Pulling the sheets out of the basket that now sat on the ground, Lisa gulped to try to suppress a hiccup, and glanced across the smooth dark water of the Realstream.

There was a sort of unofficial camp over there, where people waited for the ferry to start in the morning. As it wasn’t market day, Lisa didn’t expect there to be many people, but was surprised to see some large tents spread around a smoky fire. The tents were low — probably half-folk — but there was a man walking around the fire, poking it.

Lisa turned her attention to the clothes, coaxing Annette into digging out the bar of soap that had been her burden on the way from the house. After she had wet most of the clothes, she made the little girl scrub with the soap while she rinsed the sheets in the river water. Her hiccups were louder, as she worked less at suppressing them, but focused on her work.

It wasn’t long before she heard the voices of the men who manned the ferry as they settled the oars in place. One of them grumbled loudly about the party on the far bank – why couldn’t they have waited until later in the day – but the other men mocked his laziness, and the ferry pulled away from the shore, hanging on the cable as it pushed across the main current of the Realstream.

Lisa had just spread one of the sheets out on top of some bushes near the bank when she glanced up to look at the people across the river. The ferry had arrived there, and there were several people walking around, including two half-folk. They had what looked like a boat that was being pulled by some horses, and the ferrymen were all standing back, on the near side of the ferry instead of helping to make sure they loaded the thing correctly. While Lisa was trying to figure out why the people didn’t just cross in their own boat (although it did look small) and why they hadn’t taken down all of their tents, one of the tents moved.

It was long, low, and black, and it might have been just a row of bundles, but now it stretched and flexed, and a big, black wing reached up shakily into the air before sorting itself onto to the creature’s back.

Two men-folk followed the boat onto the ferry, and the half-folk went with them, but the other man had stripped down and was standing passively on the shore while the ferrymen leaned to their oars and began to row.

Once the ferry was well away, the last man on the shore walked to the water, and followed by not one but two large, black, sinuous shapes, slid into the water.

Lisa’s laundry was forgotten, and somewhere along the line she had lost her hiccups, too. Annette was under the bushes, under the sheets, having a sing-song conversation with one of her imaginary friends, but Lisa stood transfixed, staring at the ferry laboring across the river, and the man swimming easily through the strong current with the two black, scaly creatures.

When the man climbed, dripping from the water, his finely-etched muscles gleaming in the morning light, the first of the black creatures surged out after him. It had an ugly, scaly snout, and as she stared it opened a long mouth full of sharp teeth and yawned. The man slapped it on the neck, just behind the head, and it jerked away from him, hauling itself completely out of the river water and stretching out, two huge wings spread to catch the sun. The other creature followed, and a hideous stink like the aftermath of vomit wafted down the bank to where Lisa stood, transfixed.

The ferry tied up at the landing, and the ferrymen busied themselves with untying the restrains that had been put on the boat. Lisa could see (when she looked away from the huge, black creatures) that the boat had bat-like wings, and also, inexplicably, wheels. The horses willingly pulled it onto the bank, ignoring the huge black creatures, and one of the half-folk, a woman, climbed up to a seat at the front of the boat.

The other half-folk, a man, rose casually into the air, pivoting slowly as he looked around. Lisa wasn’t sure, but she thought he might have winked at her as he turned past her, but she thought she couldn’t be sure of anything right now.

The other two folk on the ferry were regular people, a man and a woman. The man headed over to the swimmer to give him his clothes back, while the woman paid the ferrymen. Lisa couldn’t hear what she was saying, but could tell by the tones she used that she was calming and soothing them. Lisa was so interested, trying to catch the woman’s words, that she didn’t realize one of the black creatures had silently crept closer to her.

There was a sudden whiff of the acid stench as it opened its mouth and a long, black, slimy tongue stretched out towards the drying sheet. The swimmer had just finished putting his tunic back on, and saw what the creature was doing as his head cleared the neckline.

“Hey, cut that out!” he yelled, seeming to cross the distance between them without moving. Cuffing the creature behind the head, he turned to Lisa with a slight bow.

“My apologies, miss,” he said. “He knows better – usually.” Cuffing the creature again, so that it swung its head insolently away, he grabbed it by a horn and began tugging it towards the rest of the party.

Lisa found her voice. “Sir,” she said hesitantly. “Sir –” The man turned to look at her. “What is it?”

The man smiled broadly. “Fang?” he said. “Fang’s a black dragon.”

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Final Update on the QNAP TS-473A

I don’t think there’s likely to be much of a need for another update that addresses the TS-473A as a unit. I’ve now had the unit for about two years. This is what has worked well, and what hasn’t.

The biggest disappointment was the tech support provided by QNAP. This is, perhaps, unsurprising, as tech support tends to be the dark underbelly of tech products these days. There’s no glory in providing good customer support (although a counter-example has convinced my son on a certain high-cost purchase, which is a story for another time). It would be preferable for the equipment and software to just work, but when it doesn’t, having competent people handling the support is a challenge.

It’s worth noting the hardware again. I still have no complaints about the TS-473A from a hardware perspective. It is inferior to the Synology system I have in terms of the drive bays, but the Synology isn’t a complete x64 system that can be used in multiple ways, and my understanding is that the Synology NAS systems are also not generic enough to install arbitrary x64 operating systems on them.

During my early experiments with the TS-473A one of the latches for a drive sled broke. They are rather flimsy, and I wasn’t handling it particularly harshly. The latch still works, but the “lock” broke off, and the drive can no longer be locked into place.

I contacted QNAP support, as the device was basically new, and was told that this was not covered under warranty, but that I could buy a new drive sled for (IIRC) $25. Well, it’s perhaps not surprising that it wasn’t covered under warranty, and it is at least nice that replacement sleds are available, but it’s not superlative service.

Never mind, I have a 25% failure of drive locks, but that’s mostly significant in terms of keeping from accidentally pulling a drive while it’s in use.

Last year’s update was about the changes in the way we handled our media server needs. I had started using Container Station to manage docker images of the servers that our family uses. (Primarily Jellyfin.)

Over the course of the last year, we found that this solution was very imperfect. At irregular intervals the servers would disappear from the network without explanation. When I investigated, I found that the docker containers were no longer running, and no amount of persuasion would get them running again.

Container Station does have pretty nice tools for cloning docker containers, but it was hit-or-miss to get these to actually run (frequently failing with the same error as the original containers) and when they did I sometimes had to mess with changing IP addresses for the servers, changing ports, etc. In short, my non-technical wife had to bear with her movies being in constant flux vis-à-vis where they were on the network.

This all came to a head around Thanksgiving of this year (end of November for non-US readers). The servers had come down, and no amount of cloning and coaxing would return them to service. In desperation, I contacted customer support.

I opened the support ticket on December 4, and I contacted them yesterday to tell them that my solution was to no longer use their software. During the interval, I sent them log files, screen shots, videos of using the system, etc. Although my case was “escalated” to a level 2 technical team, I was never given the privilege of communicating with them directly, needing to pass all communication back and forth via the same level 1 tech who was handling the issue.

The Tier 2 team really wanted to remote into my system. One of the reasons this was significant for me is that the QuTS Hero OS spends a lot of effort trying to convince users that we need an account with QNAP, and that we need to be syncing our NAS with their cloud. Well, QNAP is a popular enough storage solution that they have become a preferred target for hackers. It’s quite a compliment when one’s OS is individually targeted for compromise, however it exemplifies the problem with single-point-of-failure systems. If all of your eggs are in one basket, you need to make very certain that your basket is protected from threats to eggs.

My NAS is not Internet-exposed, and I was not keen on either exposing it to the Internet, and then giving credentials to outsiders, nor to having a remote session with these outsiders.

A brief note: Communication was significantly hampered by the fact that the support seems to be in Taiwan. Although the English was fine, the timing of support replies makes me think that their time zone is roughly opposite mine. While this is understandable, it made the whole process take much longer than it would otherwise. I don’t know if they would have made an effort to schedule a remote session during my availability, or if the mysteriously obscured level two team would have required me to make my system available at 1 am. If you’ve had experience with their support in this regard, I’d appreciate a comment.

In any case, although I had already sent them logs, etc., they insisted that the only way forward was to give outside access to my system, and that’s something I am very loathe to do. I decided that it was time to try the other feature that pulled me to the QNAP unit in the first place.

I spent several days using rsync to copy everything from the QNAP to an 8TB drive in my Synology JBOD unit. This done, I installed a graphics card in the QNAP and began to play around with various alternative OSes. I also made VMs of these OSes on my system, to look at them from that angle.

I was hoping to be able to pull the existing zfs pool into the new NAS system to avoid having to copy everything back in, so I focused on Linux-based products, since QuTS is Linux-based, and bsd and Linux handle zfs slightly differently.

In the end, I installed TrueNAS SCALE, the Linux variety of TrueNAS. Although it was able to see the zfs pool left behind by QuTS, it wasn’t able to import it, and I ultimately reformatted the four drives and rebuilt the pool.

That said, I’m very impressed with TrueNAS running on the QNAP hardware. It’s considerably more responsive that QuTS was, and has a nice interface, including a dashboard that shows me system information like core temperature, RAM utilization, etc. Once I committed to reformatting the storage pool, it did so quickly, and I was able to restore everything (using rsync, again) quite quickly. It not only supports docker, but it also supports the same sort of VM installation that I never particularly used on QuTS.

The docker management console is worlds better than Container Station, including the fact that it prefers bridging the network connections to the containers. This means I no longer need to try to manage static IPs for each of the servers.

I no longer have to bounce around between several similarly-named tools to try to figure out which one does the specific management task I’m looking for, and my all-important Jellyfin server was up and running in no time at all. Although iX systems does try to upsell the TrueNAS software, with cloud-backing and service contracts, and so on, it is so far a background thing, and I don’t feel I’m being badgered into it.

I’m looking forward to installing one of the llm applications featured in the “App Discovery” portion of the software. I haven’t yet pulled an arbitrary docker container from Docker Hub, since everything I’ve needed has been included.

Bottom line

I’m still pretty happy with the hardware of the TS-473A. For the price, a Ryzen-based PC with four hot-swappable drive bays and high-speed Internet built-in is a good deal. It booted to a variety of external thumb-drives without needing to dig into the bios (but, a caution — if you insert a bootable usb device and then reboot, you may be puzzled as to why your NAS isn’t starting if you don’t have a screen attached).

QuTS Hero is an ambitious effort by a hardware vendor to have a plug-and-play OS that does what you need. Unfortunately, it seems more tailored to QNAP’s business needs than mine.

Fortunately, TrueNAS SCALE installed without a hitch, and if I buy another QNAP device (probably to mirror my NAS offsite) I will probably just put TrueNAS on out of the gate.

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Greyhawk Rebooted Gets the Boot

Perhaps not the most charitable of titles.

I came late to this party, and I haven’t listened to any of the interviews or read any of the Facebook posts (I’m not on Facebook), but anyone can see that K. Scott Agnew loves the vision of Greyhawk presented by E. Gary Gygax in the old-school Greyhawk materials.

Greyhawk Rebooted was an ambitious project to bring Greyhawk 576 [1]576 was the Common Year date for the first age of the Greyhawk setting. TSR, and later Wizards of the Coast, released updates to the setting that moved a meta-narrative and also moved the calendar … Continue reading into the modern age. While part of his focus was on the 5th Edition rules, he also wanted to give DMs and players access to the vaguely defined western part of the Oerik continent. His version of a map of Oerik is probably what first caught my attention.

One of the things that modern role-players seem to struggle with is that restrictions can make a game more fun. Greyhawk was a low-to-mid magic setting (as opposed to the Forgotten Realms, a high-magic setting), gunpowder didn’t work, and it had a feudal political structure with all of the ethnocentrism that entails. All of these limitations made the setting more interesting, and gave the players broader scope for imagination. After all, what’s the point of being a scarlet tiefling-tabaxi half-breed if there’s a whole village of them down the road?

Agnew followed in the footsteps of other incarnations of the Greyhawk setting, laying out the history of Oerik, including the western part, as a background for the campaign setting. While I question some of his narrative decisions, for the most part he avoided the wizard war trope of unbeatable individuals conquering vast kingdoms with only their own power. This permits wargaming in Oerth, and is part of the fun as far as I’m concerned.

So, where can you get a copy of this material? You probably can’t. Wizards of the Coast served up a cease-and-desist order and Patreon shut the project down. A Player’s Guide to Oerik was the only part of the project completed, and the Streisand effect doesn’t seem to be at play here.

Why did this project get shut down when so many other fan projects have done well? What was it about this project that specially earned the ire of the famously irritable Wizards? I think there are three major elements.

  1. The Player’s Guide is chock-full of stolen art. People of the Internet generation tend to play somewhat fast and loose with image copyright, but it still exists. For many of these images, Wizards of the Coast only has the rights to the initial publication format — they are forbidden by copyright from using these pictures in a new product. However, because they were the source for the pictures in the Player’s Guide, they could perhaps be held liable for Agnew’s use of these pictures. He should have employed some artists with the money from the Kickstarter (and should have raised the Kickstarter goal amount if this was a problem).
  2. Agnew also ventured into Wizards’ sacred ground in the spell lists. These are full of both legacy spells and new ones attributed to copyright-protected persons. Tasha’s Hideous Malformation is the only one that I can verify is not also a newer spell in canon, but Agnew’s use of these protected identities — Wizards’ trade dress — was a boundary that fan compilations had long wisely steered clear of. Rich Burlew’s excellent comic, Order of the Stick, makes fun of this limitation (although his work is exempted, being satire), but it’s something that has been taken seriously for a long time. If you examine other works in the OGL[2]Open Gaming License-space, you’ll notice a conspicuous absence of Mind Flayers and so on.
  3. Finally, Agnew sought to monetize this work. Joseph Bloch has done some excellent work creating fanon[3]fan-made canon for the World of Greyhawk, but as far as I know has released all of it for free. By seeking to sell the Greyhawk Rebooted setting, Agnew set himself up as a competitor of Wizards of the Coast, but one who was using their own copyrighted materials.

In short (tl/dr[4]too long/didn’t read) while I think Agnew did a very good job with a lot of his project, he made some significant errors in judgement that led to a shutdown of the project. I appreciate his efforts to compile a lot of the extant fanon into one resource (making use of Canonfire, Greyhawkery, Anna B. Meyer, the Grey League, Greyhawk Stories, Dragonsfoot, Greyhawk Online, Maldin’s Greyhawk, and others), making editorial decisions about how to reconcile competing stories. I appreciate his efforts to make a place for all of the new playable races in the 5e system, although I won’t be using them. I appreciate the degree to which I think he gets the old-school vision of a world bursting with possibilities without needing to be a soap-opera. On some level, I appreciate his willingness to take a stupid risk, taking on one of the most powerful forces in gaming to make his vision a reality for other players.

It’s too bad he was never able to get to his gazetteer and DM’s guide, etc., and I have some vain hope that he’ll decide to contribute his work to a fan site like one of those listed above. By uncoupling it from the Wizards trade dress and the stolen images and just saying, “Here’s how I would integrate Dragonborn into my campaign in Greyhawk,” I think he would contribute far more to the hobby than by going the way he did. On the other hand, perhaps someone at Hasbro or Wizards will see the quality of the work he was able to do and decide to bring him onboard to make it official canon. That would be a true happy ending.

References

References
↑1 576 was the Common Year date for the first age of the Greyhawk setting. TSR, and later Wizards of the Coast, released updates to the setting that moved a meta-narrative and also moved the calendar several decades forward
↑2 Open Gaming License
↑3 fan-made canon
↑4 too long/didn’t read
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A Word About Obsidian

I’ve been using Obsidian for a while now, and it’s a tool that gets better as I use it.

Normally, that sort of statement is due to a tool’s complexity being an inhibitor at first, and then gradually an asset. There’s no question that this is true for Obsidian.

However, it’s also the case that Obsidian, itself, has gotten markedly better over the time that I’ve been using it.

What prompted this post is the recent change in the way Obsidian handles tables.

Obsidian has always supported tables, although they are not necessarily a standard Markdown feature. The support was very bare-bones, and I used the wonderful Advanced Tables and Table Extended plugins to make them more useful to me.

When a recent update to Obsidian announced that tables support had improved, my first thought was to wonder if I would need my plugins anymore. While that answer is a qualified “yes”, what Obsidian has added is by no means unhelpful.

I also use Okular as my primary PDF viewer. One of the nice features in Okular is the ability to select a table, including specifying where the row and column breaks fall, and then to paste it elsewhere.

In my previous workflow, this always required a lot of post-processing. Things sped up a bit when I discovered that pasting into LibreOffice resulted in a working table that I could then convert to text and paste into Obsidian.

All of that has changed. I can now pasted those tables (some of which are pretty large) directly into obsidian, with Obsidian taking care of the formatting.

So, what are the qualifications on my “yes” to keeping my two Tables plugins?

  1. Advanced Tables has the marvelous ability to start typing a table and then use a hotkey (I use ctrl-enter or ctrl-tab) to tell Obsidian, “Based upon what I typed, make this a table.” It’s possible that I’ll eventually stop using this in favor of the new table support’s version (using the mouse), but for the time being I’m going to keep Advanced Tables.
  2. Table Extended does something I haven’t seen anywhere else, and it’s pretty cool. The only downside is that it’s not visible in the default editor: you have to go to preview mode to see it. Therefore, all of the editing is manual.

    Table Extended allows me to make multi-row and multi-column cells, and especially multi-row headers. This is absolutely essential for tables where columns are grouped under larger headings.

Anyway, I may at some point post more about how I’m using Obsidian, but for now I just suggest you try it. Oh, one more thing I love: I use a plugin called Obsidian Git to automatically commit my changes and then push them to a remote git server. Automatic backup, plus I can now work on multiple machines without corrupting my files (because of git’s commit tracking).

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Adventures Dark and Deep

This is not a proper review of this TTFRPG1, but just a silly observation. Two of the books related to this system are the Book of Lost Lore and the Book of Lost Beasts.

I haven’t completely evaluated new vs. recycled content in these books (that will wait for the proper review, mayb), but one thing that niggles at me is the names of these books.

The cover art is great, the internal art is fine, but the Book of Lost Lore already has two Ls in it. It should be the Libram of Lost Lore. Tell me I’m wrong.

So, the Book of Lost Beasts also has two identical initial letters: B. This one was a bit trickier (partly because there are sooo many synonyms for “book”), but I’ve come up with the Book of Bygone Beasts. That lends it a flair of “ye olde and mystick past” as well as being properly alliterative.

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Update on the QNAP TS-473A

It’s been almost a year since I wrote about the QNAP NAS system, and I thought it appropriate to talk about some updated experiences.

First, I’m no longer using the DLNA server as the primary way to stream media. It’s not that it didn’t work, but it was clunky, and I knew my wife would never be happy with it.

This led to a lot of experimentation. Over the same period of time, it became clear that her iMac needed a system software update to continue to be useful as an Internet-facing machine, and since Apple does not support that model of iMac with updates, I installed Linux Mint on it.

The Linux install was easy and straightforward, and I installed a couple of things to make it look a little more Mac-like for her, but Kodi continued to give us problems, and even seemed to be more unstable than before. It certainly didn’t work well with the DLNA from the QNAP (I am still making video available from the old TrueNAS system, although it doesn’t get any new rips) and I could see that my wife was getting very frustrated.

I decided to try a different tack. I have a free account with Plex, but in my experience, they only let you stream your local content locally if you also have a paid subscription. I may be misunderstanding that, or maybe it only applies to the clients, or something, but I could never get it to do what I wanted it to do.

I then looked at Emby, and ran into some similar issues, but then I tried Jellyfin, which was a fork of an earlier version of Emby. Not only does it have a native client, it also just works in a web browser.

Back to the QNAP. QNAP ships with software called ContainerStation. This software allows one to install and run docker containers on the NAS. It allows installation from Docker Hub, which opens up the possibilities for a vast array of software running on the NAS.

One of the drawbacks of ContainerStation is that it is difficult to modify a docker configuration after it is created — specifically to change the list of file system folders that are mounted inside the docker environment. However, since it is so easy to spin up a second copy of a container and configure it the way you want, this isn’t as bad a deal as it might otherwise be.

I installed a Jellyfin docker container, and my wife is now happy with the streaming media available on her iMac. It’s easy for me to add content to, to modify metadata, etc., and she benefits from all the changes I make.

Second, there’s also a docker image for calibre-web. I haven’t decided, yet, whether this is my solution, or if I’m going to instead run an image for Calibre itself (running as a headless server). The benefit to running Calibre is that you can easily make virtual libraries based upon metadata, including tags. On calibre-web, you have to add the books one by one to the “shelf” you want them on. On the other hand, I do think the interface looks nicer for calibre-web.

All in all, I’m still quite pleased with QUTS-Hero as an OS on the NAS, and the hardware of the QNAP TS-473A. It is very responsive for what I want to do with it, and in my limited use-case it’s been a good value for the money. That said, the QNAP software for media streaming and control is terrible, and seems designed (like Plex) to try to drive you to their servers and services. No thanks. The reason I do this on-prem is to avoid having your tendrils in my stuff. The fact that ContainerStation makes it relatively painless to do this is a clear win. Also, if I do need a more complete solution of something down the road, I still have the ability to install Ubuntu, etc., to have a more fine-grained software experience.

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One Night in Two-Horse

Jared glanced down the narrow alley as they passed its mouth. His companions wouldn’t be able to see it, but Mrs. Wiggums‘ cat was stalking a rat in the weeds by the palisade. Her name wasn’t Wiggums, of course, but she was married to Mr. Wiggums, and that had been his name ever since Jared had observed him on a windy day some years ago.

Silver started to whistle, then cut it off as Jared glanced angrily at him. What was the point of listening for trouble before it found you if your comrades made so much noise? Ogre, to Jared’s right, couldn’t help how loudly he breathed, and didn’t see the point in preparation for a fight, anyway. Ogre‘s attitude was, once the fight started, he finished it.

“That’s my attitude, too, of course”, he thought as he glanced up towards the fingernail-thin sliver of Luna in the sky. “I just don’t see any point in getting more hurt in a fight than need be.” He didn’t put words to it, but he felt again the iron hate for the thin elven bones his parent had bequeathed him. He would never have Ogre‘s bulk, or his ability to be reckless in a fight.

Silver understood. He was fully human, but he was also more agile than strong. Jared could hear Silver‘s thumbnail flick the edge of one of his throwing knives, a restless fidget that didn’t mean anything, but that irritated the edges of Jared’s senses.

Jared hated night patrol. He hated most things, but night patrol brought out everything in him that he wished was different. He could see the heated forms of Flaccus the bum and his latest prostitute through the thin wall of his tent. He could hear the scrape and flutter as the bats and rats went about their nightly errands. He was aware of an entire world that his comrades were entirely unaware of, and he hated the mark of difference that it put on him.

“At least Celene won’t be up to any tricks,” he thought, glancing up at Luna. The big moon caused trouble in her own way, of course, as she pulled on Jared’s blood the way she pulled on the waters of the harbor, but Celene — the small moon led a dance that culminated on Godsday of every festival week, and She made Jared … dance.

Jared wasn’t terribly literate, but to the degree he thought in such terms, Celene was definitely capitalized, even in Her pronouns. She lit fire in his veins that peaked four times a year, and sometimes at the new moon and quarters, depending upon the year and how tired Jared was. On those nights, Jared used whatever excuses he could — once he had even abandoned his patrol-mates, and gotten a beating from Mic — in order to find a quiet, private place to dance. Celene was also one entity to whom Jared didn’t dare assign a nickname.

But, no, Celene was waxing towards the first quarter tonight, and wouldn’t cause him any embarrassment. Jared ducked under the low-hanging sign-board of the Grumpy Troll Tavern — it had been abandoned since the owner had disappeared three years ago, and the sign was going to fall into the street one of these days, but it was a kind of local entertainment when passers-by got smacked in the face by it.

Emerging at the next intersection, the lights of the Temple bloomed across their faces, spoiling Jared’s night vision. It was a Godsday, he realized, as he heard the light plucking of Charity’s harp. “It must be a processional,” he thought, since there was no one singing along to the music. He listened for the chime of the thurifer as it swung on its chain, but Silver nudged him in the ribs and they turned into the next street, the Temple fading into the darkness behind them as a whiff of salt water and rotten fish met their nostrils.

Jared had fallen a step or two behind, “Not because I want to hear more of the music,” he thought, when Ogre cried out and fell heavily on his face in the mud of the street. Pausing another moment for his eyes to adjust to the renewed darkness, Jared could now see the seed bag on the ground. “It must be soaked with mud,” he thought, for it lay in a trickle of water that always led from the well to the harbor, and he and Silver shushed Ogre like mothers as they helped him up off the ground.

“I’d send you back to Mic right now,” Silver was saying, “if it wasn’t so dark that no one will notice that you’re covered in mud. But I’ll do it if you don’t stop that cursing! It’s not professional.”

Jared grimaced in the darkness. While it was true that the merchant they were going to escort was one who cared about appearances, he always had trouble calling what the gang did “professional.” Ogre finally calmed down enough that they thought they could continue, but Jared could hear the big man’s heart racing, and the occasional cracking of his knuckles as he flexed his fists. This would be a bad night for trouble, and he fished in his pouch for a copper to throw across Norebo’s threshold when the passed the shrine a couple of streets down.

The merchant’s house was well lit, and a lamp-boy stood by the door waiting for them. When the trio emerged from the shadows in the middle of the street, the boy rapped sharply on the door, and the merchant emerged rather quickly, as though he had been waiting for them.

“Our apologies, Master Oaklock”, Silver smarmed, bowing to the wealthy man Jared thought of as Whiteface, for the powder he put on his cheeks to hide the blush of his heavy drinking.

Oaklock looked them up and down with a critical eye and sighed, resigning himself to the escort. “Thank you, Matt,” he huffed. “Perhaps Lester can wait outside?” Ogre huffed a little at this, but kept his mouth shut, and Silver continued verbally smoothing the feathers of their client as they continued towards the docks.

Jared inwardly rolled his eyes at the lamp-boy, even though he knew that the obstacle Ogre had tripped over wasn’t the only one between here and the docks, and the others couldn’t see in the dark the way he could. Still, he silently slid away from Silver and Whiteface, letting the darkness hide him, and becoming more aware of the other shapes that were concealed in the darkness.

The sound of the surf against the breakwater was loud in his ears as they came up to the Pentapus, the arcane shellfish splaying its five legs across the weather-beaten sign above the door. There was a big longshoreman leaning in at one of the tavern’s windows, so Jared silently steered Ogre to the other one. That way, he reasoned, he’d be in on any action, but wouldn’t upset Master Whiteface with his muddy clothes. Besides, he didn’t like to think of the exit being barred by that longshoreman.

Silver held the door for the merchant and the lamp-boy trimmed his lamp to wait for them to emerge. After Silver and Whiteface had disappeared inside, Jared counted three and followed them.

At least Silver was along this time, he thought. Mic seemed to have an idea that Jared was persuasive, and kept trying to cast him as the face-man. Silver could talk the scales off a flounder, as the saying went, and then charge it for the privilege. Jared thought of himself as muscle — less blunt and unimaginative than Ogre, but pointed and piercing. His eyes were two of his weapons. He leaned against the wall next to the bar and started counting.

Four longshoremen, that was certain, he thought. One man, a half-orc?, might be a sailor off the ship in the harbor, called the Ghoul. The merchant from the ship, Whiteface’s counterpart, was a fat and greasy man with deep folds on his face and stains all over his rich robes. There was half a goose in pieces on a trencher in front of him, and he scarcely looked up at Whiteface as the local merchant sat down across from him, loudly greeting him and proclaiming how good it was to see him.

“Swine?” Jared thought. No, Swine might be a better name for the half-orc, whose greenish snout was very piglike, and whose little eyes glittered as he looked around the room. Jared could see that Swine was the reason that Oil-tub (that name worked) was so nonchalant about the open bag of coins on the table next to him. The extra bulk to his tunic might be the orcish muscles Jared had heard about, but it might be armor. Jared glanced at the board and flipped a two-copper piece on the bar as he ordered a short beer, loosening a dagger beneath his cloak with his other hand as he did so.

Oil-tub wiped his greasy fingers on Swine’s cloak, and Jared was unhappy that he couldn’t read the half-breed’s expression well enough to see if he cared. One of the longshoremen had gotten up and was moving behind Silver, seeming to be looking at the dart-board on the wall behind him. The one at the window leaned out and glanced towards where Ogre slouched, impassively, at the other window. Jared ordered another beer, commenting, “For my friend,” with a gesture to Silver, when the barman looked quizzically at him. He sipped from the first beer, glad that they served in bottles down here at the docks, and feeling the heft of the glass, the balance of the bottle as he drank it down. When the balance changed, he swapped for the other bottle, getting another look from the barman.

Whiteface was starting to lose his composure. There were sheaves of parchment on the table now, and he was reading from one of them, his mouth moving as he followed the letters. Oil-tub was watching him more carefully now, although he affected nonchalance, and Jared saw that his right hand disappeared into the folds of his robe time and again. Jared exhaled and took a sip of beer every time the hand emerged empty, but he could tell things were not going well.

Silver, meanwhile, had shifted his position so that the longshoreman was no longer right behind him, and he was making facial expressions and whispering to Swine both to distract him, and to size him up. The big Half-orc didn’t react in any way, and Jared found himself wondering if the creature was just too stupid to follow a conversation. Although his head was on a swivel, and the little pig-eyes kept taking in the whole of the room, he didn’t move in any other way, and Jared had not yet seen a weapon on him.

Dismayed, Jared realized that he had become distracted. Without his noticing, the greasy merchant now held a dagger just below the table, and he had begun to lean forward. Silver was glancing back at the longshoreman behind him and Ogre seemed disengaged — perhaps he was thinking of coming in for a beer, despite orders.

Suddenly, Oil-tub lashed out with his left hand, grabbing Whiteface by the wrist of the hand that held the parchment. As the dagger began coming back and prepared to rise above the table, Jared threw the bottle of beer he had been nursing. It stung the fat merchant on the elbow and shattered, the pain causing the man to drop the knife into the folds of his robe. However, Jared’s movement had not gone unnoticed.

Swine swung a heavy club — a thick stick with a band of iron around the end — and almost caught Silver in the face as he glanced back from the longshoreman. Silver dived forward and grabbed Whiteface, pulling him under the table while he called for Lester to help.

Things moved very quickly after that. Someone threw a knife at Jared that caught him in the left shoulder. The Half-orc now had an axe in one of his hands, and Silver’s back was unprotected, sticking out from beneath the table. Jared threw his dagger, intending to hit the Half-orc in the shoulder joint, gasping as the half-man lurched into the path of the blade and took it in the throat.

The longshoreman at the window was in the tavern now, having been thrown head-first through the window by Ogre, who entered the room by the door laughing wildly. Silver was on his back, kicking at a couple of longshoremen who were trying to pull him up and away by his legs, while Whiteface hid wretchedly under the table.

Jared threw the other beer bottle, and grabbed a wine bottle before the barman could put it out of reach behind the bar. Smashing the end off the bottle to make a satisfyingly jagged edge, he leapt forward from the bar to the side of the obese merchant.

“Call off the dogs,” he snarled, nicking the man slightly with the sharp glass. While he held the bottle mostly steady, he found the fallen knife in the man’s robes and retrieved it. He didn’t hear Oil-tub give the stand-down order.

He didn’t see Ogre fly into two of the longshoremen, bearing them bodily to the ground. He didn’t see Silver get to his feet, and then punch one of the longshoremen who renewed the attack when they saw that Ogre hadn’t stopped.

He seemed to hear a heartbeat, though it was not with his ears. The little pig-eyes of the half-breed locked onto his, and Swine reached up, pulled on Jared’s dagger, and died. Jared didn’t know what it was, but he seemed to feel it as the Half-orc’s spirit rushed out of his body and into the darkness.

He came to himself when one of the longshoremen tackled him, and he wrestled himself free, smashing the man’s face into the floor. Silver had somehow gotten Oaklock to the door, so Jared retrieved his dagger from the fallen Half-orc and picked up the latter’s club to help Ogre pacify the remaining longshoremen. He took a moment to knock the greasy merchant unconscious during the melee, aware that he might have things more dangerous than daggers hidden in his robes.

When the last of the longshoremen was moaning on the floor and Ogre looked around to find no more foes, he jerked his head towards the door and the two of them followed Silver and Whiteface into the darkness, Jared stopping only long enough to pick up the bag of coins from the table on the way.

As he glanced through the window as they began their way back, he saw the stiff, ungainly corpse of the Half-orc. What affinity had passed between them as that man died, he wondered. Was it simply that they were alike, the ugly and the handsome, both cast-offs of monsters who had left them to find their own way in the world of humans?

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QNAP TS-473A First Impressions

Christmas came early at the Wood household, as we decided to make good on years of talk about separating the gift-giving from the celebration of the Savior’s birth. Picking a day when we would all be available, and so on, we settled on December 18.

One of the new toys is the QNAP NAS system referenced in the post title.

The interface could be a little more explanatory, and I was glad that I had read up to know that I would need to select the new QuTS hero OS right away if I wanted to use it.

OS installation took a while, but I just left it running and went to do other things, and before long it was all there.

One reason I wanted to use the new QuTS hero 5 OS is that it uses ZFS2 by default. ZFS is said to be the OS for preventing bit rot, or the gradual degradation of data from random changes to the storage medium, so I’ve been using it on my homebuilt NAS (that currently runs TrueNAS).

QNAP has a pretty good reputation for their software (and are popular enough that they are the targets of specially-designed malware), but I was still a little nervous about migration. Supposedly, you can also wipe the box and put another OS on it (like TrueNAS), so I could theoretically end up with a similar setup to what I have, but on more NAS-friendly hardware. Still, I have been struggling with the media streaming element of my home server setup.

We’ve traditionally been using file shares and Kodi to stream our media around the house, but it didn’t work quite as well as we’d like. For one thing, running Kodi on each machine that wanted to consume media meant that we had a separate library on each machine. Some of our media is a little quixotic, and the “matches” found in the movie database were usually not very family-friendly. Trying to get the info updated on all client machines was frustrating.

So far, the new QNAP looks promising as a way to get around some of these difficulties. For one thing, the DLNA3 implementation “just works”. (My client is VLC, which I had generally avoided as a media player in the past, but the interface has gotten a lot better.) This should mean that I can edit the metadata for my music, movies, and TV shows, and the clients (including Kodi) will pull that information when they connect to the DLNA server.

What about the hardware?

Drive installation was really painless. It’s a “nearly” tool-free process that is tool-free if you want it to be. Basically, the device uses drive sleds (provided) that have the old clip-style drive rails. They attach to the outside of the sled and poke through the holes into the mounting screw holes on the drive. For better retention, you can (optionally) use the provided4 screws to secure the drive to the sled using the screw holes on the underside of the drive.

It’s not as simple and straightforward as the sled-free system on the Synology JBOD5 system I have, but I really have no complaints.

There are USB ports on the front of the device, and you can program an action to take place when the button on the front is pressed. (Basically, do you want to automatically import media to your server — like connecting your camera, for instance — or back up to NAS storage, etc.)

There are also USB ports on the back, so you can attach more storage (like the Synology JBOD device I have) if the four drive bays (in my model) aren’t enough for you, and you don’t want to spring for a whole new NAS system.

Other details

There are a lot of options for connecting the QNAP to other storage services, either to use cloud services as a backup to the QNAP, or to use the QNAP as a local cache of the cloud services. You can link it together with other NAS devices to back up off-site, so it really makes it easy to make backups, rather than just copies.

I mentioned ZFS briefly when I started this post — one of the other features of ZFS is that it can very easily make RAID systems of varying flexibility. It’s relatively easy to add and remove drives from the RAID, and as long as you’re patient, and your hardware isn’t too slow, you shouldn’t lose data. I have four 8TB drives that will end up living in this QNAP, and that should provide a certain amount of redundancy to the data storage in this NAS.

Final observation, before I go back to playing with this thing: QuTS provides an app called Ubuntu Linux Station, that allows me to install an Ubuntu 20.04 or 18.04 VM on the NAS. While this is terrible overkill for most things that I want a NAS to do, it does allow me a simple way to set up a Calibre Content Server on the network. I’ve been running one from my desktop, but not only will I feel better with that stuff stored away from the rest of my stuff (okay, backed up, since I’ll be keeping a copy of everything on my computer, too), but it will make it easier for me to convince my family to look to the network for ebooks.

I’m sure as time goes by I will find out other things that I want this server to do, and so far I’m really impressed by the flexibility of the QuTS to let me do them.