I can’t believe it’s the year 1831 already; time flies. I’ve recently set up an inn, making the most of the passing trade in a quiet area of Peyrebeille in France. It’s a great idea of mine, although a few other farmers who run it with me had the same idea: bring in some well off people travelling through, try to steal from them and if they kick up a bit of a fuss, kill them a bit. Simple.
It’s a bit of a competition between us inn keepers, we all want to be the richest but it’s tricky. The things going on at the inn often catch the interest of the police, and getting rid of them or throwing them off the scent can be a bit awkward at times. But let me explain how I go about my business first of all. Every day several guests come and knock on our door, hoping to find a room to stay in – if we’ve got any available, open rooms then we welcome them in with open arms (after all, the more guests we have the more money we can take from them…) and leave them to go to their rooms.
But while they don’t know it yet, going to their rooms might be the worst thing they can do. At night time, we tend to do our finest work, but only have time to do one thing each night. Some nights I might bribe a guest to get them to side with me and become my accomplice, but doing so will occasionally mean other guests I’d previous persuaded to join me will leave the inn and move on with their travelling. That might well be ok though, sometimes you have to sacrifice some low-life types in order to win over those slightly higher in society. I’m sure I’ll live.
Which is more than can be said for some of my guests.
Every now and then I might decide that I could use a few extra Francs, and the easiest way to stop the guests fighting back when I try and rob them is to kill them. So some nights, that’s exactly what I do. Again I need some help with this, and depending on who else that I’ve bribed is good at killing people will depend on how many of my allies move onwards with their travels and who stays with me, but when you’ve got to kill, you’ve got to kill. Life goes on. Well, it does for some. The trouble is, it’s quite an effort to kill someone – you’d be surprised – so I don’t generally have time to bury them the same night. I know, not ideal, but I also might not have anywhere to even bury them, it depends if I’ve got an annex with a bit of room under the floorboards.
If not, I’ll need to build one. I do that sometimes, sending one of my people to build the annex and letting me use their power from that point on as a result. This also takes a whole night (not a bad time scale for a whole annex I feel), but at least I can start to get rid of those slightly off-putting corpses hanging around, so that’s nice. I can bury guests under annexes made by one of the other owners of the inn if needs be, but they’d insist on me splitting the earnings with them, so I’d rather not. Mind you, that’s better than the times a policeman was staying at the inn and nearly spotted my unburied corpses – I had to go and pay the local gravedigger a fee to get rid of them for me, and the cheeky sod not only charged me but also took the money from the corpses too. Rude.
After all this, after my exhausting evenings of bribing, killing, building and burying I still can’t go to bed; my accomplices need paying to keep them onside, but at least I can make a few quid from the guests still in the hotel (the ones still alive, obviously…) before I tell them to clear off the next day. Then I can hit the sack, have some kip and go through it all again the next day. Eventually there’ll come a time where we start to see everyone again, I guess on the way back from wherever they travelled to. They don’t tend to come a third time though, that’s when it all goes quiet and we clear up some lose ends. Left over corpses need disposing of by the gravedigger again before the cops show up, but that little chore is balanced by being able to earn a few pounds from my nice little annexes, so that’s nice. Between us owners, we figure out who has made the most – it’s a little game we play each time a new crop of travellers turns up for the first time! Last time a couple of us had the same amount, so we decided to pick a winner based on how many dead people were under our annexes. Of course, being a bit of a psychopath, I won convincingly. But whether I win or lose I really like running the inn with my friends. I enjoy putting corpses under other people’s annex, I know it loses me money but if they have a dead guy waiting to be buried it sort of screws them over when the police show up because they can’t bury them, which is fun. Also, picking my accomplices is a tricky but very tactical decision, even if the better person in the long run isn’t quite as cute.
I even tried running the inn by myself a few times, I did things a little differently but it worked better than I thought; it’s still more fun when there are more of us in charge trying to be the biggest success, but it’s nice to know that if they’re out and about and I want to accept a few more travelling folk by myself, I can do without worrying about it being a dull few days.
So, without wanting to sound like one of those idiots who tells others what they think of things they’ve tried out, I’d recommend setting up an inn at some point and tricking travelling people into staying with you. There’s a reasonably good chance they’ll live through it, but I’m sure they’d accept that if it meant you were more successful then their death is probably worthwhile in the long run. I’ve seen several sets of people come and go, with various co-owners, and I’ve enjoyed it every time. It’s certainly something to consider when deciding what your next career move should be, that’s for sure.
The Bloody Inn
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