------------- Stacked Deck – Selina (two sides of the card)

Thief, backstabber, trollop, best friend.

Selinianna Meryteryth, AKA Selina Merit, AKA Mary Marks, AKA Anna Terrin, AKA Lynn Redstone.

Selina wasn’t exactly met under the best of circumstances. After Cage and the rest of us formed the Stacked Deck, which seemed a logical name considering our predilection for gambling and Anna and Lana’s obvious assets, we started looking around for work. Well, there’s no shortage of Venture Companies in the Pouarr Nation. Danine over at the Guildhouse tells me she has five hundred and fifty on the books under guild registry worldwide. Somehow I figured there’d be more. Out of that, maybe forty or fifty work the area around the Pouarr Nation. Most of those are down south, but between Rangershome, Woodshome and Beastshome, maybe fifteen. So work for us was decidedly lacking for a long time. And what work there was didn’t really amount to much.

When we did get a juicy assignment, it naturally turned bad. Seemed there was a wealthy guildsman who had trouble with a band of thieves down southeast of Brightwater. He said he’d tried several of the local crews but none could track this particular lot or break into the inner circle. On a business trip north he’d stumbled on a name, an elven girl named Lynn Redstone. He offered us a goodly sum to investigate and bring the thieves to justice. The long and short of it, Lynn Redstone wasn’t the villain of this little plot, the guildsman was. We butted heads with the Sherriff of a border Atheaen town and ended up having to break “Lynn” out of jail, after capturing her and taking her there ourselves. “Lynn Redstone” turned out to be just another alias of a wily and foxy Zeigus thief. By the time it was all over, we had managed to turn the Sherriff over to the Atheaen military, got the guildsman arrested and expelled from the Shipping Guild, and gained a thief amongst our ranks.

Over the next few months we didn’t learn much about Selina, and what we did learn was hard to come by. She wasn’t one to easily trust. She came from Carellon, youngest daughter of a military family, and was obviously a big disappointment to them. I got the impression something happened to her family, perhaps they were killed in one of the big wars back a hundred years ago. She never talked about them. She ended up on the streets and on her own, and she did what she had to do to survive. She didn’t have anything in common with Anna, and only a little more than that with Lana. Lana kinda took her in and tried to make her welcome, which started Selina sleeping with everyone in the company one or two at a time. After a few months of tension between us, we all sat down one night and hashed it out. We’d done enough adventuring by then that Selina had started to trust us, if not with her heart, at the very least, to watch her backside. Since then, things have been a lot smoother. I guess she and I have more in common than the rest, as our relationship has turned into something a little more than just occasional lovers.

I’m glad to count her as one of my closest friends, even if she is a backstabbing trollop who can’t be trusted.

------------- Credits

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