Notes Found Scattered on the Desk of Lord Chetwin of Amber

Touching, really. Family reunion and funeral all wrapped into one. I think Vialle was kinda fond of me...on a completely unrelated note, she never talked to me that much.

So, we went back to my shadow. This is where I must make some explanation for posterity. It is widely known that Corwin and Bleys made a chicken-shit attempt to take Amber. It is also widely known that the troops they used looked like a real stinker of a vaudeville act...but they were hard-working, tough, easily manipulated saps. The big red ones had realistic, bendable arms and legs AND they came with plastic swords right in the package. The little grey-fuzzies had the brains. I decided to combine the two shadows and make medium-sized red fuzzy guys...with enough brains to take orders and enough guts to make key business decisions in my absence. I also warped the time stream of the place, while I enacted a breeding program designed to produce Senior VPs. After long and frustrating attempts at stretching every base-pair in their genes to its most potent configuration, I witnessed the birth of the most business-minded member of their species. Or as close as I was going to get. The name Falstaff fit him rather well.

As for the place itself, it is also a blending of Corwin and Bleys' shadows. The geography ranges from the crater-ridden and exceedingly sultry plains of Avernus, to the cold and uninteresting mountains of Ri'ik. In short, it is vastly more interesting than its "parent" shadows. The name of my place follows suit: "Averick", from "Avernus" and "Ri'ik". I decided that to simply spell it as "Averi'ik", would be taking too much from one name...and I am not overly fond of artistic apostraphes. It's one big city...except for the places where there are actual sulpher-filled craters or craggy peaks...even then, it is not entirely uncommon for the highly enterprising or the desperately broke to attempt to open commercial centers on rafts out in the sulfur. Needless to say, the only such enterprises that have ever been profitable have been the sulfer mines...

As odd as this may seem, I have only a basic working knowlege of the inner workings and culture of my own sovereign shadow...I know all of the zoning in the city, designed some of the major constructions, and can recite the major stocks...but I am not often seen out and about, hob-nobbing with the residents and partaking of their medium-sized-red-fuzzy pastimes...Although they do trade extensively with nearby shadows, they only do so with my help, and have not been made wise to the true nature of things. They believe that they are trading with other planets in their own solar system, via my "teleporters". In reality, the "teleporters" are simply shadow-gateways, to which I have attached industrial-sized conveyor belts. They drop their goods on the belt, they vanish into a large red-and-blue-decked building, then they recieve payment on the incoming treadmill. One of the bordering shadows is extremely primitive. I have informed THEM that the textiles, coal, and lumber that come through the hole in the mountain are gifts from their totem gods...and that those gods demand gratuity. We in the shadow-walking-finding-creating trade term this region of shadow "the gullible belt." I have, in the case of this particular shadow, had to engage in a bit of economic handicapping...the poor stone-age yobs chuck pitiful baubles on the conveyor. I have set up a piece of shadow-warping to turn these things into Averickian currency...at a sort of shadow-exchange rate.

Dyl-- I'd met her a couple of times...at previous funerals, actually. She conjures up images of grass skirts and coconuts. She also smells a bit like a Gaia-Screeching-Weirdo. That, coupled with the fact that she's Gerard's...I just didn't talk to her much. She was the first to agree to try gang-trumping Martin. Later on, Random ordered us to head up the investigation into all of his children's vanishing...From then on, she has been a useful, if highly distractable partner. So, there I was, at this latest shin-dig, trying to convince people that Martin- at the very least- wouldn't just skip out on Vialle's last bash. She was one of only a handful of us that wanted to try gang-trumping him. We tried it. We got the general impression of a large space filled entirely with crude oil. Martin is not given to truly perverse shadows, so I could only assume that this effect was some kind of new-fangled trump-jamming. Probably the chaosites' latest terrorist innovation.

If I had not become fixated on Martin's vanishing, and annoyed at the family's general impotence, with regard to his location...I probably would not have been selected by the king to go and locate his lost offspring. It is slightly embarrassing to note that I didn't want the job that badly...I was just pissed that it wasn't being done...

From the great empires of the Golden Circle, all the way down to the upstart vandals of shadow Earth, political bodies have always had some idea of WHERE THEIR BORDERS ARE. I suppose this oversight on Amber's part could be some grand strategy whereby Benedict and Oberon (I put them in this order for a damn good reason) could lay claim to EVERYTHING, just because they never bothered to look at any piece of territory and say "Oh...ummm. That's not ours." I have immense distaste for such vagueness and non-specific politicking. I say, if we really feel we can defend ourselves, let everybody know the line they need to cross if they want their ass kicked. The setup now, seems to be if you want to sneak into Arden, the official border of Amber is the place where your head lands after Julian lops it off. He's good, but I've got uncles who have seen him turn that elephant-horse's ass at the enemy and run quivering back to Benedict. I'd just rather have a little more security than the limit of Julian's valor.

Ahh...yes. My sword. More footnotes for posterity. I am sick and freakin' tired of the collective egos of Amber engaging each other in an edged-weapon arms race. Who's got the most enchanted-ass sword in all of shadow. Who's got the most difficult-to-pronounce blade in the land? So much steaming bullshit. We're the most gifted swordsmen to ever cross blades with anything. We should be able to strike fear into the hordes of shadow and chaos with normal steel. Thus, my own unpretentious, unceremonious sword. As I tell everyone that asks about it "I have an ordinary sword, forged of ordinary steel, on an ordinary anvil. So I gave it an ordinary name..." That name is...Bob. I rather like the name. It is simple, self-effacing, yet somewhat ominous. It also gives me the seed of a very memorable and infinitely badass catch-phrase, which I always utter, upon ventilating a foe of Amber. Upon the fatal thrust, I say "<insert name of antagonist>, meet Bob." then, as I remove the blade from their carcass "Bob, this is <name>."

If we don't find out that the house belonging to the these jokers is empty of its master/mistress...and I've pulled my sticky-door caper for nothing, I'd say the next name on the terrorists' hit-list (besides yours-truly, of course) would have to be one of Bleys' kids. That is assuming that they won't first try to re-capture the one's I've sprung, but that's not likely. Bley's daughters, because they've got the most info relating to his death...of course, they've already spilled their guts to me. So I'd guess they're marked for death, rather than capture. Aunt Fi's daughter might come next, since she's the one taking care of her mother AND her duplicate. They don't know how talkative the real Fi or the faux-Fi have been...so they have to assume the worst- that they've both told her everything they know. Another death-mark. The next possibility is my own brother. He might have just been suckered in as a trigger-man, and he might know too much now. They MIGHT just capture him, as a bargain-chip...but if I were him, I'd rather they killed me. Bastion is an idiot, anyway. I'VE proven that he doesn't have what it takes to get involved in hardcore gangster-type shit. When he thought that unknown assailants had captured his prized pooch, he went flapping off, right where I wanted him. I'm just one jackass who wanted to ransack his room. He's involved with multiple seasoned badasses, even meaner than I am. The second they know he's got a four-pawed-feathered soft-spot, they've got him by the...gizzard (I think he's got one of those).

Martin's Shadow-

It's actually fairly close to mine. That congruency rule coming into play again...Our shadows have very similar "recipies": high technology and magic coexisting, urban sprawl, gullible residents, etc. His is just slightly more violent than mine...The violent aspect is why I thought to call Martin about the armor. I do not intend to have my head turned into a wall-decoration. So I dragged the others there. He seems to have a multifaceted research faclilty going, in the main city, where he's the head-honcho. This came as somewhat of a surprise to me...I'd thought his interests were somewhat limited to music, bad haircuts, and the various exploits of the punk-rocker. He was more than happy to measure us for the armor and was able to produce it in an extremely short time. He wasn't even miffed, when the horses expressed a desire for high-tech barding. I have an urge, now, to gloss over parts of the armor-gathering experience, but I have to describe the events in order to illustrate further, the character of Julian's latest daughter. She wanted to help us test the armor, but her strange shadow-Earth-morph shadow didn't have much in the way of firearms...still she insisted on learning it herself. To her credit, she was okay with the pistols. I didn't even fall over, when she peppered at me with them (we had, by the way, already tested the armor WITHOUT me in it)...then they pulled out the freaking AK-47 or whatever the hell it was...the only warning I got was the first few shots that went wide, while the recoil caused the gun to leap up and whack her braincase. Before I could tell her "NOOOOO!!!!!", she got it under control. I went head over heels and landed on my ass. Please ring up a "no sale" in your brain, for that image. I had to EXPLAIN to her that bulletproof does not mean that you don't BRUISE LIKE HELL, when you're hit by multiple rounds of HIGH CALIBER BULLETS!! The bruises lasted for a while. I was annoyed. I don't believe she even admitted that she was wrong...oh well, at least she's coming into her instincts...

Have patience. We will steal more as they arrive.