“Roman Inertis” may be the type of name that anyone from Godville to Herolympus would believe is a certain type of name that suits a certain type of hero: strong, bold, smart, moralistic.
But alas, Roman Inertis is none of these things. He is a cruel and evil clod who only serves his goddess, Efficacia, out of spite.
Roman began his journey as an infant in Bumchester; small, weak and plagued with chickenpox scars, Roman learned very quickly that the other children in his district did not enjoy his favourite snack, Pickled Hamster Foetus, when he was chased by a mob of them for even suggesting the fare during a harvest festival.
From that point on, Roman kept to himself and his parents, Brutus and Barda Inertis, in the dark and dingy cul-de-sac their horrible little family called home. The family business was built on what Roman’s grandfather, Cascus Inertis, considered an empire: post-plague corpse disposal and body burning. Unfortunately for him, the only plague that ever effected Bumchester was the chickenpox, from which Roman was permanently marked, because mages had used white magic to globally eradicate all plagues ten years prior to Roman’s birth.
Alas, that didn’t stop the Inertis family from spearheading the corpse burning industry in Bumchester! The Inertis’ “Burn Ya Fam” Body Disposal & Management Company tried very hard to curry public favour but not even their hotly-promoted “2-for-1 Infant Twin Special! Wow!” could entice the masses.
Every Thursday from ages 5 to 27, Roman would stand in the town square with a promotional sandwich board practising his important role as “moldy produce target”. He grew more and more tired of standing in silence while every man, woman and nonbinary person hurled their week’s worth of garbage and expired sustenance in his direction, often times making contact with one or more of his body parts.
One pallid Thursday evening while Roman was trapsing back to his family’s cul-de-sac after a particularly brutal month-old tomato barrage, he came across a large gold coin glittering in a rotting produce-filled gutter. With an interested smirk, Roman snatched the coin and inspected it closely. Relief! “If this coin is real gold,” he smugly mumbled to no one but himself, “we can buy a whole year’s worth of semi-magic-but-mostly-oil cremating accelerant! We could even burn this whole town dow—!”
CRACK! A thunderbolt crashed down from the sky, piercing the very center of the coin where a shallow “Raptus Regaliter” inscription was etched in. The coin shot out of Roman’s hand, rocketed directly toward the center of his face, slammed off the bridge of his nose and landed in the shallow fountain beside him. Dizzy with pain, Roman fell onto his knees beside the fountain, haplessly ignoring the stream of blood pouring from his face. “My accelerant!” He gasped as he splashed about in the now-crimson-red fountain’s basin, quickly filling up the water supply with even more blood.
After exactly seven minutes and twenty-three seconds worth of searching, Roman jumped up; arm shot out to the sky, face bruised and bloody, clothes wet and stained, he proudly held his bount—CRACK!
Down from the sky shot another lightning bolt, this time knocking Roman off his feet and directly into the fountain. The tiny sector of Bumchester that Roman was passing through, which was normally pretty bland and grungy, immediately took on the appearance of a murder crime scene as he lay collapsed in the morbid fountain with concerning splatters of blood on the walls around him.
As he slowly opened his eyes through blood, sweat, tears and leftover rotting tomato, the visage of a beautiful woman came into view. And while Roman may have felt some initial arousal laying there in the bloody fountain, any desire to use one of his many cheesy pick-up lines was quashed as soon as she stomped her ruby-encrusted gold boot directly onto his chest, snatched his chin with her small, cold hands and grinned in the most menacing of ways. Spreading her perfect red lips into a mischievous smile, she purred, “I see you’ve found my coin, the Lady of Gruels,” she spun the coin between her finger and thumb on her left hand and continued, “and then you bled on it! My goodness! I haven’t had a sacrifice in a millennia! How nice it will be to have a bonded thrall to do my bidding once again.”
“Wh-who are you…” Roman sputtered, bloody water leaking from his mouth.
The woman dropped his chin, sending his head slamming back into the fountain. She placed her hands on her hips and shouted, “I am Efficacia from the Pantheon of Toiling! You performed a blood sacrifice with my coin and now you belong to me. Well, I can’t say that I didn’t have any… influence in that matter.”
With a wave of her hand and a cruel smirk, the Goddess Efficacia called down a lightning bolt that—CRACK—set Roman’s promotional sandwich board ablaze.
“And now it is time to start your journey.”