[The British Isles, Wessex , Cerne ,March of 793]
Mark shoved a wooden trencher toward the abbot. "Eat up, priest. Your ransom will be your weight in gold, so fatten up fast before we pour water in you," he said, sitting down beside him with a grin.
Abbot Benedict opened his eyes and broke off a prayer to stare at the bowl. "I am not a priest," he said "I am an abbot."
Mark shrugged. "Tomato, tomato. Same thing for our purposes."
The abbot's pale hands trembled as he pushed the spoon back. "You are strange. Where do you come from?" he asked, desperate for any answer that might explain this predicament.
"Far," Mark said, as casual as if naming a town. "Very Very far."
"Why are you doing this?" Benedict pressed. "You and your men have wronged no one here. You treated the folk kindly. Abandon this madness. When the king comes, he will bring hundreds. You cannot stand against them."
"Hundreds?" Mark smiled, amused. "That's manageable."
"Manageable?" the abbot repeated, aghast. "There are six of you. You will die. You must see it"
Mark's grin didn't falter. "Here you're wrong. unlike you we will never die in this world, we return. If we face the army and live, we seize a king. If we die and fail, I am reborn and punished and the next time, our leaders will be with us . Don't pity me, father. This is not madness. I call it the safest bet I've ever made and It's a wager i will always take."
"The only pity if any of us were to die we lose our armor and weapons, it will pain us greatly as each was made specifically for each of us and it will be a hassle crawling back to take it back from the carcass of the idot who took it from our cold dead bodies" Jason added from the side
"Both of you, stop trying to break the poor npc code and come help," said the guild officer, sorting the haul. He jabbed a gauntleted finger at the scattered spoils. "The thegn's chest was a disappointment ,maybe a kilo of silver at best, a few silver plates, a decorated sword fit for the wall, and most of his wealth is tied up in animals, cloth and books. Not much to cart in a hurry."
"And the abbot?" one of the others asked.
"That abbot… a different story." The officer's eyes gleamed. "Three kilos of silver, some bits of gold, and a few relics set with emeralds. Proper treasure for a holy man."
He paused, glanced at them all, then went blunt. "We six can't move all this. I've pinged my superiors, they said hold position; they'll try to spawn near us but as you know that will take a very long time for them to get lucky and spawn on the same continent
The choice is ours now., we either carry what we can in a cart and try to escape and hide or wait for the two ransoms?"
"How much is it worth, then?" one of the extras muttered.
The officer counted out loud. "Four kilos of silver total here. Silver-to-gold's roughly twelve to one. Four kilos is four thousand grams , divide by twelve and you get about 333 grams of gold.
That's roughly seventy-five, maybe eighty gold coins. Add relics and other trinkets , call that another twenty gold. So the lot we can move now is worth close to a hundred gold coins. About a thousand credits, if that's the measure you like."
"Without the ransoms," the officer continued, "we've got a hundred gold. With both ransoms , thegn and abbot , you're looking at roughly another fifty gold each, maybe more depending on how the king values his men. That pushes the total toward two thousand coins, the same amount in credits."
Mark pushed himself up, eyes on the stacked silver. He let the numbers sink in, then looked at each of them. "So," he said, slow and steady, "the big question, is it worth dying , losing our weapons and armor, for fifteen-hundred credits?"
"Extras hug their armor and weapons in panic"
"There's only one fair way to decide," Mark said at last. He leaned close to Jason, voice a half whisper that the others couldn't help but catch.
"Jason" whispered Mark.
"yes mark" replied Jason
"get the hens"