ER:Leofric

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A minor NPC ("minor" for everyone but Lillith, for whom he plays a brief but highly significant role) in the Errant Road on-line free-form role-playing game. Needless to say, he doesn't, or didn't, exist in the Poe-verse. He's introduced here.

Leofric is a half elf, the leader of the small half-elven community in the smuggler's haven of Nautkia in southern Veracia. Lillith and her fellow adventurers visit this out-of-the-way place as they search for the renegade priest Father Egbert, whom they have tracked to the town. While they're there, doing things that take the entire "Nautkia, and the South" thread to develop, Lillith and her half-elf nature attract the attention of a member of Leofric's community, and he arranges to meet the young priestess. A substantial sub-thread develops from this meet-up.

Leofric is the owner-manager of a nursery/greenhouse in town, and he and his fellow half elves generally get along well enough there; as he puts it, "For many years, Nautkia has been a place where we can hide in plain sight. The smugglers who run the town, and who by the way help us keep our business flourishing, don't care what their clients' ears look like. And they don't permit overt prejudice to interfere with business, either. Anything here that interferes with business attracts the attention of powerful and ruthless people, and I mean anything." Alas, this comfortable (at least by half-elven standards) way of life was interrupted, not long before Lillith and colleagues appear, by the arrival of an elf, the nasty Peregin Bauti, although Leofric doesn't know the name. Seeing disaster if he and his people are discovered, he asks Lillith to help deal with the threat. After exploring some alternatives that wouldn't work well, he proposes that she help them get back to Santuariel, the place they came from before moving to Nautkia (and also Lillith's home town), via a boat skippered by smuggler Lucy Kankaniel. She nervously agrees, despite never having dealt with a band of smugglers in her life.

The ensuing complications take a fair fraction of the Nautkia thread, one of the main complications being that Lucy Kankaniel isn't just another smuggler; she's Egbert's sister, and he has made arrangements for her to spirit him away to a new home somewhere. She also has incurred the wrath of one of the smuggling rings in town, and they, in turn, have extorted Argus into a "hit" on her and her ship. Somehow it all works out in the end (for everyone except the unfortunate Egbert, who meets a most disturbing end just as Leofric and his party are boarding the ship), and Leofric is last seen sailing off to start a new life -- minus the devastated Lillith, who'd hoped to join them.

It may or may not be significant that when, many years (of real time) later, a party of player characters (Desiree and Therese) finally makes it to Santuariel, Leofric is not mentioned as being there, although Lillith has made it to town with her new husband Brad and is happily expecting twins. What became of them? A tale yet to be told in Errant Road, perhaps; the game just keeps going and going and going ...

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