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Baldur’s Gate is a wonderful place. Known also as Halfway to Everywhere, it is one of the largest city-states on the Sword Coast. This influential merchant centre, city full of commerce and opportunities, seems to be offering chances for a bright future to everyone. Or to be a bit more specific, everyone who had the luck to be born either wealthy merchant or Upper city patriar.
Enver Flynn is none of those. He is an unhappy miserable child but who could blame him for it? Lower city is a place of misery and whoever claims otherwise is a fool living in self-deception.
While the better parts of the city are busy with trade, marketplaces overflowing with rare goods, luxurious fabrics, rare gems and exotic fruits here the streets are filled only with thieves, crooks and charlatans and one would struggle to buy fruit or fish that does not already smell of rot. While the songs of bards trying to make a coin are never falling silent in the Upper City, these parts of Lower City can enjoy only the sounds of crying orphans and sick beggars spreading their germs around in their dying breaths. And while on the other side the air is filled with the rich flavour of odours of freshly baked pastries and expensive perfumes and blooming flowers, here one’s nostrils will get hit only with smell of piss and decay and bodies that get washed only when it rains.
Enver Flynn always felt like there must have been some mistake. He could not really belong here; he could not really be meant for this terrible and unhappy place. He hates how people's faces contort with disgust or pity when they look down upon him as they do not really see him as a person but only as a pathetic poverty-stricken child. Poor peasant whose only concern is how to survive till the next meal and how to protect said meal so some of the ever hungry rats do not steal it away.
Though right now rats for a fact are his concern. They were chewing on his father’s leather and people just do not desire to buy shoes with a rat's nest in it. And so as it is a tradition by now, whenever any unpleasant task appeared, Enver was the one assigned to it. What else was a child then a slave to fulfil any wish and whim of their parents, obediently bearing all screaming and beating and all the degrading tasks. And of course the entire time he needs to stay grateful that he was not thrown on streets yet.
One day. One day Enver will just leave without even glancing back and he will not return till he has enough money and success to rub into the faces of his spiteful parents. However that day was not today and so any plans and dreams of future greatness must take a backseat to the troubles with rats.
Whenever a problem is posed in front of Enver, no matter how much he wishes to be petty and ignorant towards tasks his parents throw at him, his brain simply cannot stop itself and starts offering solutions. Several ideas come to his mind almost immediately. There is no point in running around the shop or the attic hoping to run into some of those annoying pests nor just laying around simple traps. Even if they could afford to buy one, rats are unfortunately smart creatures, there is no point trying to approach the issue with methods already well known to fail.
The original new and innovative idea is needed and Enver is never lacking those. Coming up with possible answers to the problem is not the real issue. Getting the needed materials is the harder part. The nails he could “borrow” from his father’s workspace. He knew of a broken fence at the house that appeared to be abandoned and there he gained a few simple wooden planks. But he still needed some rope, or better yet a wire. Luckily he knew where fishermen hid their crawfish traps overnight.
When all the materials are gathered he can start assembling them together. He still dislikes the task and that it was given to him. However there is some sense of satisfaction, a sense of meaning to be found, in crafting, in combining things together and creating something new. To his own surprise he finds out to feel till now unknown sense of satisfaction from his work. Even though his hands are clumsy, wire is bending strangely under his unskilled fingers, planks do not fully fit together and nails spread unevenly, he feels excitement over his accomplishment. What once was a vague fleeing idea now gained a physical form by his will it was born into world.
The construction looks ugly, like a child built it - because it did. A little tower of wood and wire with a bridge-like part to be positioned on the table. There will be a bit of food placed inside, his parents will surely not miss a slice of stale bread that is probably meant to be tonight's dinner. The rat will get in, its weight triggering a mechanism and the bridge will tilt down. And down the vermin will slide, down on the bottom of his little tower of wood and wire and also nails. The board at the bottom is covered in them. Sharp metal spikes waiting for something to be impaled on them.
He sets his trap. He waits. Eyes glued to it, crouch down a few feet away. He is quite good at staying still and quiet, an unfortunate skill obtained by every child of unhappy parents that tend to look for excuses for punishment whenever their own miserable life frustrates them too much.
And he waits.
It always felt like the rats were everywhere. Trying to steal leftovers from his dinner, pulling out straws from his already thin mattress, gnawing at the corners of those few spare books their household had. But it is not as if he has anything else, anything more exciting awaiting him anywhere in his life…
And so he waits some more.
And as it always tends to be, only when he starts losing his patience, when he lets his eyes wander around the room without even realising he is doing so, only then he hears the click, his amateurish mechanism working as intended, and the sound of an animal in distress falling through his trap. Enver lets out a joyful giggle as there is usually not many things to be excited for and both catching an annoying rat and his invention doing what it was designed for is a good enough reason for little celebration.
When the initial thrill passes he smacks his tongue against the roof of his mouth disapprovingly – a gesture he noticed adults are doing sometimes when they are not fully happy with their work – and he is not fully content with the result of his work either. There is a pathetic sound coming out of the foul creature but it does not sound like a dying scream. The sound of rapid movement and scratching of the wall made out of cranky wooden planks suggest that the rat is still very much alive.
The mechanism luring the rodent in worked perfectly, so did the trigger that trapped the rat inside. But Enver never intended to just trap it, that’s why he wasted so many of nails on the bottom part of it. The vermin was inconveniencing him long enough, it deserves to suffer. Maybe next time he needs to let the animal fall from bigger hight. Or maybe the nails are too thick, he would need thinner ones. Maybe he should add another board full of nails that would fall down upon the creature so it gets crushed in deadly squeeze between them.
Well, it does not matter now. He will improve his trap next time. But to do so, he has to get rid of the current occupant, his prisoner, the creature he caught and which now was completely at his mercy. He wondered what it would look like impaled on those nails. And, well, he needs to kill the pest somehow anyway, no point just throwing it out else it will crawl back.
Enver removes the top part of his trap and takes one of the spare planks. He thrusts it down crushing the rat against the nails at the bottom of his creation. He enjoys the desperate little squeak the vermin lets out in its dying breath. It is satisfying for once to hold such a control over something and its life. Have a living being at his mercy. Holding its fate in his hands and deciding that the only fate it deserves is death. There is the sound of little bones cracking, there is the painful cry of the dying animal, there is a gleeful smile on Enver’s face and then there is also a scream.
Too focused on the task, he does not even hear his mother climbing the stairs and entering the room just to witness final moments of his triumph over the cursed rodent. Hard to say why she even came here right now. Was she wondering where her son is slacking off? Did she come up with a new stupid task to waste his time with, as the previous one might have already slipped her mind? Or was she here for a completely different reason as she is always happy to forget she even has a child.
“Enver! What have you done?” he does not really understand why his mother sounds so horrified. He turns to her pleased smile on his face as he is still just a child and a hope of receiving praise has not yet been fully beaten out of him.
“I’ve caught the rat!” he proudly presents his trap, his little invention he created all by himself. The crushed body of the pathetic pest impaled on nails is still twitching a bit. There is a little puddle of blood on the floor.
Enver Flynn does not understand where all the swearing and curses came from, why is he being pulled by his ear downstairs, why his mother in her fit of hysteria calls him a sadistic monster and why his father starts unbuckling his belt. He has just done exactly what they asked him to do. He caught the rat. He got them rid of one of those damned vermin. Is it not exactly what they wanted from him?
They do not seem to hear his word of explanation, they do not see his vision and the trap he worked so hard on the entire day it angrily thrown out of the window. And they never stop to tell him why, offer a reason for their hateful behaviour. They just scream and call him wicked and wrong and depraved.
But they never say why.
By now he takes those words as compliments. If they consider themselves to be the norm he would very much prefer to be deviant. He will force them, he will force the entirety of Baldur’s Gate to see his potential, appreciate all of his never ending flow of ideas and brilliance. They all will be one day the rat crushed in his trap.