The Blade of Rauxod frowned at the ship captain. "A fortnight?" he repeated back to the man. "Aye, m'lord, an' believe you me it's long for my liking as well." Sir Red had liked to think that he'd rode to Beluaterra upon a storm of his fury; clearly the downside of this was that his fury had absolutely trashed the ship's main -mast, which meant he'd be stuck here far longer than he liked. With a sigh, he dismissed the freeman, then looked again to the chaos in the city. So, Benedicta hadn't been completely addled; he could see the devastation that had been wrought upon Unger from its port, even by the moonlight, and the dark shapes which moved about slaughtering its population. Suppose I should do something about this, he thought. "ARMOR!" he bellowed, before he realized that he'd left his squire at home to guard his brother.
Of course, this didn't alter his needs. Turning on the nearest sailor, he pretended like he'd been talking to him all along. "Armor!" he hissed. "Now." Minutes later, his plate and chain suit was in place, clanking and crashing with each step as he stomped down a gangway that seemed like to snap at the weight of all that steel and nobility. His armor was polished with gold trim, the griffon and stallion rampant of House Marlboro upon his breast. As it was damnably cold here, he'd taken the extra step of throwing an oversized crimson gambeson over the suit, leaving it undone in the front as it couldn't quite close. The sailor he'd pressed into action followed along behind him, bearing great kite shield with the device of Pax Cagila emblazened upon it.
The tall, powerfully-built knight paused at the bottom of the plank, tossing a black waraxe from hand to hand as if it were a child's wooden toy. He knew that he'd need men, but not where to find them in this unfamiliar place. But he didn't have to go far before the scattered population began to come out of hiding, emboldened by the presence of the ostentatious foreigner. He carefully selected a number of them to follow him further. While they were unarmed, unburied dead lay all over the place, some with fine weapons and armor themselves, so they were quickly relieved of these things in the name of survival of those yet alive.
A lesser man might've been broken by the fact that the pleas he'd callously ignored had been genuine, but Red had been raised by a harsh and impatient father who had beat such habits out of him at a young age. No, Red never cried. He got angry, and then he got even. The paragon of modern military technology stomped towards the broken lines of the Thalmarkins, in the midst of several dozen well-armed and mentally-broken peasants. "Boys!" he cried, "Let's start a riot!" He retrieved his shield from his ersatz squire, and began to bang his axe against it like a slow war drum...
