Onyxport was a seaside trading town at the center of the Black Coast, the former named for its once famous mines that held bountiful amounts of the black gem, the latter named for its ominous black sand and black cliffs that made up its jagged coast. Now, Onyxport was just a trading hub and autonomous city, which made it an extremely attractive place for the nobility to hoard wealth and commit crimes.
Due to the people's entrepreneur culture and dog-eat-magically-corrupted-dog philosophy, the Enforcers were, obviously, extremely corrupt and incompetent, but they did at least keep a semblance of order, though mostly in The Upper Walks of the inconveniently vertical city as that's where the airships land, and only those with wealth get to ride in one.
In Middens, the Unions kept a tighter control of the order as the laborers required a more structured and stable environment to perform their work. They had no protections against pollution though, so the lower you went, the more of white that got placed by dirty gray and then by dark or brown from grease, sooth, and whatever other contaminant that wasn't immediately lethal. You can't have your workers die too fast, can you?
No, it's only when you reached the levels of The Slums that things started to become unstable. With no unifying authority, only the bonds that humans and non-humans were able to create that prevented from true anarchy from reigning. At most, people behaved near the docks because nobody wanted to disrupt the shady shipments that arrived in rickety diesel ships.
The cold waters of the Sea of Tears and the polluted delta of the Twelve Fingers river changed the sailors, they became strange and irritable, worse than even a civilized greenskin. The people who learned to live in the shattered cliffside that Onyxport had been unsafely built upon were rugged and tenacious, but even they didn't want to pick a fight with a sailor.
Though life was hard, the impoverished people still had their humanity (even though it may be so very impure), forming small communities, but these bonds could only stretch so far, which allowed gangs to thrive. There weren't many scraps to fight each other for, so they didn't control the entirety of The Slums, and it was from the middle of one of these peaceful areas that Alistar Rouge hailed from.
Too handsome, too smart, and too bold for his own good, the tall and slender man would be stealing maidens' hearts if he didn't live in The Slums. His wild black hair was a perfect match to his pointy cat ears, wild amber eyes, long fluffy tail, and dangerous-looking claws. Men with a small touch of beast in them never went out of fashion, and the fetish was even having a resurgence in popularity among women these days as the Empire's faith had just recently declared that "impure" humans had the same rights as the "pure."
Alistar was too busy in his profession to pay attention to girls for now, though. Born a thief, raised a thief, and a thief by choice, he had been tormenting the Lower Nobility living at the White Square. It was the lowest clean area in Middens, and also a retreat for the eccentric or reclusive, be they noble or simply wealthy, it was a place for those who wanted privacy from the white marble jungle of The Upper Walks. More importantly, Alistar found out they were at the perfect balance of being wealthy enough it was worth stealing from, but not wealthy enough to have the security to keep the slick rogue away.
He needed just a bit more money to be able to comfortably brag about it (and consequently market himself to pretty women), and Gunther knew all about it, so the surprisingly wide and surprisingly short man had the perfect men when the perfect job fell on his table. Questions were regularly raised about whether Gunther was "stretched" as a child, but he's actually more famous for being known as The Fence among the more enthusiastic youths who still saw romance in the life of a burglar.
This odd figure, which wasn't so odd in The Slums of Onyxport, was about to help Alistar commit the best worst mistake of his life, which would also save him from dying an unglorious death. Rogues like the young catman rarely lived long, though sometimes life just killed the rogue inside them rather than killing the person itself.
"Alistar! I got something for you, come back here quick!" Gunther growled as the rogue catman pranced into the stuffy pawn shop.
Convenient, as he had came exactly for that, but the suddenness surprised him. "Who's going to look over the shop, then?" he curiously asked as he look around at the junk and-or treasure on sale. Value was in the eye of the beholder in this shop.
"Nobody ever comes in," the portly man snorted.
"How do you even make money, then?" Alistar playfully replied, ever upbeat.
But Gunther's smile was like an iridescent Wish coin: nobody in the Slums ever saw any. "Obviously through the thing I'm going to tell you if you decide to ever come into the back of the shop," he answered exasperatedly. Though grumpy, he was still beloved by his community.
"Alright, alright. Why the hurry?" the catman curiously replied as he followed the short and girthy man who somehow managed to squeeze through the thin, greasy corridor.
"The window of opportunity is short before she wisens up," Gunther grunted as he put out his cigar on the tray, then took a seat by an empty table, ominously illuminated by a single strong light.
The dimly lit atmosphere and even heavier smell of smoke in the air made Alistar's pretty nose complain, but the young man appreciated the glamour of discussing shady jobs in a shady back room of a shady shop. So he grabbed a chair and reversed it before sitting so he could look as rebellious as his heart yearned for.
"Who?" he inquired eagerly.
"Do you know Countessa Narcisa von Rubenflamme?" the wide man enunciated as pompously as the name deserved.
"Who doesn't? Most beautiful woman of the White Square that I've never seen because she's an eccentric shut-in." And the name piqued his curiosity for a number of reasons. The fact that she was known to be beautiful being quite high among them.
And Gunther loudly cleared his throat. "Well, someone has, and they say that she has a massive black onyx orb in a display that she's bragging about to her neighbors."
"Nobody at the mines has seen any that's bigger than the tip of your dick in years!" Alistar exclaimed, his cat tail straight like an exclamation mark.
The round man pouted like an angry frog for a second, not often engaging in banter. "Shut up, but also true. So this is the opportunity: invade her home and steal it before she realizes how valuable it is and hires more guards. She lives in a big mansion with only one bodyguard and rumor has it that he's her lover."
The young burglar wanted to ask a dozen questions because this job felt like he was asked to jump into the Twelve Fingers without a diving suit. Well, (so far) it's a myth that the river was named because you're likely to come out of it with twelve fingers; it's more that jumping off a cliff into the polluted river was simply a stupid idea.
But he didn't have the time, or the patience, or even the maturity to ask all of them, so he chose the one that was about the most important part for the success of this operation. "What if she has alarms all over the case?"
Unfortunately, Gunther simply shrugged. His job wasn't to come up with the plan, after all. "Then nab it while they're fucking so you have enough time to run. Here, I even got a map of the mansion for you." Then he pushed a paper onto the table and tapped it with a fat finger.
But the young cat man took only one look at it before he hissed, "That sounds like a terrible plan."
And Gunther turned into a frog again as he pouted like a child. "Well then come up with your own because that's all the info I have for you."
Alistar would not, in fact, come up with a better plan.
He simply sighed and grabbed the map. "Alright, fine, I'll just scout the place as always. Thanks for the tip."
This put a bright smile upon the frogman-that-wasn't-really-a-frogman's face. "And remember to come fence it with me!"
It's not like Alistar knew who else to fence it to. His community was small, and he never managed to make friends with people of another community as he was just too handsome for The Slums. But it was this very same manly beauty that allowed him to walk in the White Square with a simple suit and mingle perfectly among the wealthy.
--
After stealing so many times from these houses, the security was getting tighter, and he decided this would be the last time he stole from there (for a while), so why not investigate the juiciest prey while he could? Countessa Narcisa's home was at one of the tips of the White Square, right at the edge of a cliff that led to one of the Twelve Fingers down below, and then to the shore of another section of The Slums. If one simply didn't look down, they'd see right ahead of them the humble stone and timber homes of the people of Middens, built around towers and tall black cliffs. And of course, just a glance up and you'd see only white towers and white and gold houses of The Upper Walks, connected by pretty arched bridges.
A rather pretty view, if one simply didn't look down.
Alistar dreamed about stealing from the people of The Upper Walks. Living there? "No, thank you," he'd think. It was already tense walking the streets of Middens as the people seemed awfully judgmental even while perfectly disguised, so how much worse the uppity Uppers would be?
Well, at that moment the people were tense because it was late at night, and that's when the evil creatures crawled out to party, but Alistar had never seen one, so he calmly used it as cover for his criminal deeds. After gracefully nodding at a patrol of Enforcers like a real blue blood, he turned a left and started walking without making a sound, even his cane he avoided clacking upon the cobble sidewalk to not attract attention. The critical moment approached.
He suddenly stopped before the street's energy relay box and casually picked the lock in a couple of seconds. "No hesitation means no suspicion," is a lesson he learned by chance and allowed him to simply walk into a wedding party and steal lunch. So he also wasted not a second to pulled apart the cables, turning off the street lights, but he left them barely touching, so that they would eventually reconnect on their own simply from the magi-magnetic attraction.
Now, a catman like him could easily blend into the absolute darkness of the night. For a short while, the handsome burglar was free from having to pretend to be a refined gentleman, and so he happily pranced towards his target.
Countessa's home was another boring place according to Alistar's taste: a large house surrounded by tall walls for privacy reasons, but also the easiest one to infiltrate. So he merely stopped before her gate, then took off his top hat and pulled out of it a little metal box with a gauge and a flask of a dull, gray liquid.
The Chaos in his Magic Detector was almost completely inert, but as long as he could pick the faintest signal, it'd still be enough to tell him where the alarms could be located. After shaking it with the delicacy of a prostitute in a hurry, he frowned at the gauge that refused to move. There seemed to be no spell or ward protecting the gate, a serious misstep.
So the fake dapper gentleman slotted the Detector back in a slot inside his top hat and grabbed another gadget, a stone with an Analysis sigil engraved in it. Certainly, there must be a Sigilcraft alarm somewhere, right?
Nope.
"This can't be right. Is the Countessa actually a 'terne'?" he thought to himself as he held the glowing stone inside his top hat to not let the light leak. Aside from the usual incomprehensible (to him) sigil that glowed whenever he touched the stone, there was no other reaction, so what kind of security this noblewoman had around her house?
There was little time to waste, though. The street lights would turn back on and if he tried to turn them off again, that'd attract maintenance personnel, so his window of opportunity was closing, but his decision was immediate.
"The cat gracefully jumps into the trap," Alistar thought to himself again as he quickly climbed over the gate with cat-like grace then fell onto his feet with less than that same grace. "Oops, I'm still mostly human."
After steadying himself, he waited for a second, and since he wasn't zapped or shot by anything, he dashed forward with light footsteps, one hand holding his top hat and the other searching his chest pocket for the map while his cane hang from his arm.
Once he got to the front door, he stopped and let his cat ears do their job. Surprisingly, he picked up female moans along with another sound that could either be a bed creaking or flesh slapping.
"So that's how the rumors about her sex-life started."
But still, his cat burglar senses were tingling. This was the sloppiest security he had ever seen in a noble home, meaning this was the luckiest job he ever had the pleasure (and future displeasure) of accepting. He was no clairvoyant, though, so he continued his scouting-turned-burglary.
Vases, paintings, books, swords, armor, shiny cutlery, and whatever the fuck glowing magical decorations these were. None of these valuables mattered to him as he silently beelined to a central room of the third floor. There, he found a glass display that contained the most ominous black onyx he had ever seen.
It's almost like it was a perfect black hole, with barely any sheen but so perfectly round he wondered if it'd roll infinitely. That's not how physics worked, though, but his senses were correct in telling him this was no ordinary jewel. Even the most senior jeweler would've been entranced by it, but Alistar's senses were too naive to recognize the danger of this onyx.
He stepped forward, forgetting to move silently, and touched the glass case, then took off his top hat and swiped the gem with it at the same as he lifted the case. He didn't even remember to use his detection tools, but they would've been useless for the Countessa didn't need security for the jewel.
The moment his hat touched the onyx sphere, his thumb also brushed against its eerily perfectly smooth surface, and a vision made him freeze in place.
--
There once was much anger, darkness, hunger, and sin. Evil grew so powerful it was cursed for eternity, even outlasting death.
If this Evil is not forgotten, then punishment shall rain from the heavens one day.
The taint spreads easily. Do not touch again.
--
Abstract but still horrific images flooded into his mind, and the only thing he understood was the cryptic message, which seemed like a warning, a prophecy, and an epitaph, all at the same time. But the real meaning of it didn't matter to Alistar as he knew this jewel was Evil and it'd be a mistake to get even more involved with it.
When he came to be, he saw two figures before him. One was a shiny knight in full armor pressing a sword to Alistar's throat and a gaze as sharp and cold as his blade, and the other was a tall and gorgeous lady of fiery hair, equally fiery dress, and fiercely angry gaze.
There was no light in the room, so even Alistar couldn't see all of the details of their faces, but he was the only catman in there as the other two were supposedly pure humans, and supposedly unable to see as well in the dark as him.
"Fuck…" he eloquently thought to himself.
"Frederik, decapitate him," Countessa calmly ordered with the sweetest voice before Alistar could think further, yet in his mind she sounded so monstrous he wondered if she was even human.
"FUCK!" he internally expressed mild frustration at this rather inconvenient predicament.
But his cat-like reflexes saved him, as to decapitate someone, the blade needed to be pulled back so that the slice had enough energy to chop through flesh and bone.
There was no time to steal the huge and heavy onyx orb anymore. Alistar spun in place and dashed forward towards the balcony. He heard no sound from the shiny man wrapped in metal, yet suddenly he felt something cold slice against his back as he crashed against the glass of the balcony's door.
A searing pain all over his back accompanied the sharp pain all over the front of his body for glass is never easy to just barrel through, but then his legs failed him, and his belly slammed against the stone railing. His speed was so high though that his upper body simply continued forward, and he flipped over the edge.
The last thing he saw was both the Countessa and her knight peering over the balcony as he fell over the cliff. Then he splashed against the polluted water of one of the Twelve Fingers, and it was as if he fell into a wall of bricks.
This all happened in less than five seconds.
But the noise of Alistar crashing against the glass of the balcony doors alerted someone. A young woman looked up and saw a body fall into the water. She knew that it came from the Countessa's home, and before she lost the unfortunate victim as it sank in the murky, filthy waters, she jumped in after it.
"He touched the orb, but I don't expect him to survive," the Countessa seethed quietly while angrily gripping her favorite fan, then she turned around and left.
But the bloodthirsty knight wasn't satisfied. He saw, through the darkness and while also high up in the cliff, the woman who jump into the water, and he knew that the slash wasn't enough to kill the young man instantly.
And Frederik always finished whatever job his beloved Countessa gave him.