Talk:Reg Margin

Backstory

Reg Margin was a Mohlok peasant who lived the salted fields between the ancient city of Salomoné — more or less on the site of the modern rooms of Grad — and the Royal Forests of Bretton, banking into the Ferrous Mountains. Being marshy badlands, the stinking runoffs form those benighted hills,, nothing much grows there and, like many of the local peasantry, Reg supplemented his meagre scratchings poaching game from the royal hunting grounds in the dark woods of Bretton.

One day, when checking his traps, he stumbles upon, an emaciated and strange intruder feasting roasting a some stocks he has taken from one of Reg’s shorting gin cages.

Reg snatched the youth by the scruff of his filthy neck, drew him up to eye level and stared into his dark, glittering eyes.

The boy babbled in a foreign tongue, apparently pleading for mercy. Reg held up a giant finger to the intruders lips and he quietened.

“Now,” said Reg, “I might be possessed of no great capacity for knowing things, nor figuring things, but I’m an old hand at believin’ things, and surmisin’ about things, and I believe and surmise that, what with them dark eyes and that tousled dark hair, worn in that foreign-looking way and, added to all of that, that strange way you have of saying things, that your kind is not from these parts?”

The captive’s eyes widen and he says, with great reverence and in flawless, if archaic, high Lanchmani:

“But, good sir, you speak in the tongue of the Lanchmani! You must, I’ll venture, a noble merchant be, on of the royal city of Salomoné! I am so very greatly honoured to be bettered by so great a warrior! As is your Lanchmani protocol, I give myself up to thee! I humbly novate myself to you!”

Reg furrowed his colossal ginger brow. “Who, or what, little man, are you?”

“Paripasu .. . V... Vlad Paripasu,” he squeaked. “but a humble scholar from the lands to East and South, I have journeyed many arduous days from my mountain home in search of the wisdom of the great Lanchmani, and to learn their ways.”

Now Reg wasn’t of the Lanchmani at all, but was an indentured peasant, a Mohlok, engaged by the Lanchmani to keep the city’s engine running and royal sewerage system clean, but he figured there was no call to disabuse his captive of his sense of grandiosity.

“Well that's as may be, see, but, humble scholar or not, you be still pinching my stuff. And we can't be having that.”

“Ah no, no, no,” muttered the little fellow, and Reg had it in his mind that he was scheming or plotting something.

Seeing as you seem a cunning little fellow, how about — and Reg fell silent, and with a thick hemp rope, bound the Carpathian trickster to a tree.

After a while, he said, “Pinching? Stealing? Oh, no Sir! But I can see why you might be confused —”

“I en’t confused — not so as no more than normal, least anyways — but while I decide what I best be doing with you, perhaps you can tells me why you be stealing my stocks?”

“Borrowing them, sire, Borrowing them; I reiterated, I am no thief: I shall return them, with interest, at your command. ’Tis my business.”

“Business? Who had a business borrowing another fellow’s stocks?”

“To lend them to those who most need them.”

“Lend them?”

“Indeed: they who need them most pay handsomely and strong, sire. They can return the goods when their circumstances permit. In the mean time, they will pay a good commission. We can share that. We can be Partners!”

“Partners!” with that Reg roared with laughter. “Who are these borrowers of your stocks?”

“Well, now — for example, you look hungry, right now, sire —”

“Oh, that I am. Hungry. Very hungry.”

“So aren’t you pleased that Vlad Paripasu, your friendly lender, is here to make a market for you!” The man held out a tin cup of the the steaming stock.

Reg took it and eagerly took a long draught. “Oh, Vlad, it is very good.”

“Isn’t it just. The finest royal stocks! And my prices are fair.”

“Prices?”

Vlad held out his hand. “A gold coin”

“A gold coin? for my own catches?”

“Business is business! How else will we have something to share?”

With an air of bafflement, Reg handed over a copper, and devoured the stock. The two men ate and drank their fill then fell asleep by the fire.

They were rudely awakened not two hours later by the King’s Guard, conducting a routine audit patrol of the King's hunting grounds.

“What have we here?” said the watch commander. Two poachers. Vlad leaps to Reg’s defence, explaining to the King’s guard that far from Reg having stolen the game, he had in fact just dispossessed thieves of it and was returning to the King. When pressed, Vlad explains it was a nasty-looking Romanian thief.

“Well, who are you, then?”

“I am a victim too! The thief kidnapped me. Reg here rescued me. He is a hero.”

The King’s guard show clemency and appoint Reg and Vlad to guard the forests which they do in return for a generous stipend. Vlad becomes Reg’s consigliere, for the cost of a portion of the King’s Rent (paid first of course). Vlad squirrels away his share, selling it at a mark-up to the other villagers who in turn pay fealty to reg, who pays a slice to Vlad.

Vlad in time persuades the villagers to mind the forest, persuading them for a small fee that they may enjoy the beauty and nature as long as they take nothing and keep an eye out for hunters and poachers.

Vlad in the meantime ingratiates himself to the king, with fantastic but delusional presentations about the forward wealth of the kingdom, entitling him to a yet greater share of its present wealth, and warning him of great dangers in Romania, and encouraging the king to send his army into the Carpathians, where they are beset by brigands and vandals. One day Reg stumbles across the Synthæse.