[Doctor Gabriel]

Harriet and George Stoutman had just settled into bed for the evening. The outer ring of Atticus was certainly not the ideal place to spend one's winter years, but they'd been able to toil their way into this cozy little dwelling by working honest jobs long and smartly over the years.

They had gotten married young and had never fallen out of love, even now cozied up close to one another snuggly and sharing a novel held between them, lit by the candle on the night stand.

The racket outside couldn't ruin there pleasant evening, there was always some sort of hullabaloo out there anyway. So even with the strange noises, they felt safe and warm in their cozy little bed in their humbly furnished room.

Then a man in a golden coat came crashing through the wall and smashed their Bureau to splinters in a cloud of dust and debris.

~~~~~

King Gabriel made a noise that was some mixture of a grunt and a groan, a groant if you will, as his back smashed through a brick wall, a wooden dresser, and then finally stopped against a second wall.

He sat gasping for a moment, hoping to get the wind knocked back into him, then began coughing through the cloud of collateral damage surrounding him. He wasn't surprised at all to see the blood that came out of his mouth with every other the cough, he was lucky a touch of internal bleeding seemed the worst the beast at done to him.

Well, not lucky so much as unnaturally difficult to kill.

"Okay..." he spat in annoyance, wiping the blood and spittle from his lips, "Ow."

He rose to his feet with the aid of his swords and was pleased to find that he felt fine, despite a touch of dizziness and the beginnings of one hell of a bruise on his back.

It was just about then he noticed the horrified elderly couple staring at him as they clutched each other for dear life in their little bed and trembled as if they were in the presence of Death itself.

"Oh... Uh, sorry about that..." Lord Gabriel blushed and scratched the back of his head with a tinge of guilt before smiling at them reassuringly, "But worry not! It'll take more than that to kill a King! And your King will find a way to make this up to you! ...Eventually!"

His Majesty returned his attention to the bizarre "Bumblraffe," as he'd decided to call it. It was staring right at him for a moment until a number crossbow bolts clanged against its carapace and sent the creature careening backwards into the building opposite our King almost cartoonishly. As if that wasn't enough, Lord Gabriel actually snickered upon seeing the creature emerge from the rubble with it's head upside down.

He grinned almost maniacally and pressed the triggers on his Chainswords twice, in rapid succession. The black and white twins of rotating metal teeth accelerated to an almost unseeable speed and steam began gushing out of the little vents on the sides of their hilts to compensate for the strain on the mechanism.

"Alright, Fuzzy" The King muttered under a deep breath, "Let's try this again."

With that he dove the blades into floor and sped toward the gaping hole he'd created. The whirring chains carried him along like the treads of some terminal velocity tank and pulled him behind them, making the man look like a skier being dragged by his poles.

"OI!" The Vagrant King bellowed at the furry beast, "DINNER'S OVER HERE, SHITHEAD!"

The Bumblraffe, turned its gargantuan wrongside up head toward the sound, it's unnervingly human eyes now distinctly enraged and fixated directly on the lunatic speeding toward it. It's head shot towards him, overhead jaws spread wide to catch the prey offering itself so willingly, right as His Highness's blades met the bit of wall he'd left standing.

With only centimeters between Our Good King and fluffy, smashy death, he used the jarring stop of the blades meeting the wall to catapult himself over the beast's fury yellow head. With inhuman grace, King Gabriel about spun like golden propeller in the cold night air and landed with a thump on the Bumbleraffe's head.

The Vagrant King stabbed the tips of his swords into the creatures fuzzy yellow shell and angled them to allow the chains to begin working away at it. The Bumbleraffe thrashed and attempted to dislodged His Highness, but the swords and given him a decent hold, even if they hadn't yet found their mark. Finally, there was the satisfying snap of the last bit of shell and the euphoric wet sound of tearing flesh.

The creature reared and screeched as he dashed down along it's spine, assuming it had one, and trailed his blades behind him, leaving parallel trails of rent chitin and black, sludgy blood in his wake.

The monster's end reached, King Gabriel sprung from its back and onto a nearby roof. Spun around and twirled the Chainswords again victoriously.

"HOW'D YA LIKE ME NOW, BITCH?!" The honorable and excessively humble Lord Gabriel taunted smugly before dodging another of the creature's strikes and avoiding a bit of unnecessary deja vu.