Bay Area Champions -- Part 1: Boneyards

This is the start of a short story I wrote based on one of the many campaigns I played with my old gaming group in the SF Bay Area. Only the names have been changed (somewhat) to protect the guilty and due to some artistic license. And Rob, consider this some of my long-delayed fiction for your project.

Boneyards

Most retrospectives and retellings of the Raid on Boa begin with Krusader’s investigation of a rash of grave robbing incidents. Earlywine’s bestselling book on Krusader and his contemporaries, Expediters and Deathdealers, correctly attributes many of the breakthroughs in this investigation to Krusader.

This was during his “private investigator” phase, when the vigilante-turned-hero had begun a mildly successful career as consulting detective, and had professed a marked aversion to the explosive displays of skillful puissance that bookended his colorful career.

As though graced by some manner of metahuman prescience or prior experience, and from only two known missing corpses at the time, he correctly divined the criteria of the body thieves: the remains of religious men from different faiths who’d fallen from grace and had committed suicide. He also correctly surmised that the Bone Corps, a legion of six hundred sixty-six undead powerhouses, was directing cells of necrotech-wielding worshippers to use the stolen bodies in a ritual for some unknown purpose. His zeal and thoroughness proved his undoing, however. By providing the authorities with a list of probable targets with disturbing completeness and unfolding accuracy, he cast sufficient suspicion on himself – leading to his temporary arrest.

His exoneration came too late, and despite the aid of his friends, a single shuddering gate of the Bone Corps was summoned into being over San Mateo, California.