Journal

7 July 2017, evening, aboard an unknown vessel

I have a confession to make. I’ve never had any formal training in this stuff. Where does one go to learn how to kill demons, you ask? Well, turns out there are entire cadres of Hunters with their own schools of thought on how best to dispose of the unholy monsters oozing from every crack in the border between this world and the next. 

I didn’t know this when I first started, of course. All it took was witnessing an attack on my family and being helpless to stop it. I did my own research and trained on my own. Before I knew it, it had become my life’s work. The information’s out there if you know where to find it. It helped that I ran into many gracious souls along the way who were willing to impart their wisdom, if not help me directly.

It’s frowned upon to work outside the Law, you see. I am an aberration they would rather see crushed by that stupid tentacled greater demon than running around doing things on my own. So I avoid them at all costs. I stay out of their way, they stay out of mine, and everyone’s happy–relatively speaking. I’m not sure their kind can be happy. I think it’s against their religion or something.

That being said, it was only natural that when I woke up on the deck of a formidable frigate in the middle of the North Sea after being nearly crushed to death, the voice that greeted me sounded mighty displeased.

His accent was so thick, I could barely understand him. “Vhat did you zink you vere doing, going after zat zing like zat? You should be dead right now! If I hadn’t been in ze area….”

German? Austrian? Polish?

He kept going, talking to me though I still pretended to sleep. It was several more minutes before he calmed down. “Vhen you vake up, ve will have some serious discussion to make.”

Yes. Ve vould have some serious discussion to make. If he was a sanctioned Hunter, there was every chance he would turn me in to the Council and my chances of finding the thing that had killed my family would dwindle down to nothing. New plan–escape–but how to do that in the middle of the ocean when I had no idea where my own vessel was would be a dilemma to puzzle through right after I passed out again.