[center][h1][b][color=af002a]Theodore Valentin[/color][/b][/h1]
[img]https://i.imgur.com/d2x4Jzk.png[/img]

[b]//A3 - On Route to the Abyss[/b][/center][hr][hr]
Even as some of the adventurers sneered at the workers, Theodore merely smiled faintly as he observed and assessed the would-be pioneers. The most promising ones were the best prepared ones, but to get someone of their ilk under his wing? He’d need something convincing. In a pinch, he could make do with the doe-eyed ones as followers. Unlike his current employer, however, he didn’t want to obtain someone merely to waste them as ‘dead meat’.

First, he’d prefer some experience, even if it was in the form of a mining trip. He noted the jokingly macabre exchanges about goblins and lycans, determined that neither him nor any of his would be killed. However, it did occur to him that these other workers who’d signed up for this might be quite proficient in surviving. After all, minor injury was leagues better than death, dismemberment, being eaten alive, or who knew what else.

Theo’s gaze only briefly lingered on the slaves. It brought back memories, that. The sight was visceral to him in a way that the poverty-stricken homeless of the Underpass – whose suffering he was unfamiliar with – had not been.

[i]Pleading eyes. Pleading for death. For an end to the suffering. Or worse: insensate, lifeless eyes staring unseeingly at nothing – perhaps, already glimpsing the imagined afterworld. Desiccated bodies drained of their blood, of their life essence. A relief of bones etched into paper-thin skin. Living skeletons; mere shells of bodies lingering on the earth, waiting. Waiting to be free, for eternal rest to claim them, and grant them reprieve.

He had given them that. That final, absolute freedom.

Arnfinn had been the only one different. The first one to show him that there could be another way.[/i]

But at this very moment, there was nothing indeed to do about those wretches, no way to free them. No saving graces, whether an easy death or a ‘heroic’ saving was in store for the slaves.

Theodore passed them by, not entirely unaffected. A new insight was gained; in Oratorio, those who were too weak could and [i]would[/i] be enslaved. A fate worse than death, if you asked him. To be avoided at any and all cost.

Would the Abyss prove that [i]people[/i] were the worst monsters? Or would literal beasts, savage and relentless, put things into perspective?