The firing pin in his pistol was forged from the tip of a cavalry sword that had broken off in a warcheif's skull some forty years back. That was what the shopkeeper had claimed, anyway. It had silver plating on either side, engraved with a scene of beasts dancing in the moonlight. It had looked fearsome in the shop window, but there was a lot of care that needed to go into keeping it gleaming - a special polish to keep a patina from forming, and a delicate touch to remove the tarnish if he ever forgot. The shopkeeper had spun a story about the weapon, and Ashton had been taken in, enough that he came back and stole the pistol that very night. Most likely the shopkeeper had been telling lies trying to drum up business, but it wasn't too long before Ashton noticed something peculiar about it. On the night of a full moon, the pistol never missed.
He had other bits of magic as well, small pieces of bric-a-brac that he could carry on his person. There was a small fossil that would drip with blood when you squeezed it, and a coin that would land on its side nine times out of ten. He had a pen that would start writing out a letter of apology, no matter what it was you'd intended to put to paper, and which didn't seem to need any ink. The inside of his broad rimmed hat glowed with a yellow like he imagined molten gold would, but only in the summer. And he had a compass that seemed to point in random directions, though he'd never been able to figure out what it meant, if anything. There were a half dozen others, all small enough to fit in his bag. He called them his "curiosities". Ashton liked having these small mysteries to puzzle over. He halfway hoped that someday someone smarter than he was would come along and tell him all about these bits of magic, but maybe it was that the world just didn't make that much sense sometimes.
He'd taken to calling himself the Midnight Marksman, since that was the only time that the pistol's power worked. If you needed someone killed between midnight and four in the morning on the night of the full moon, Ashton Burrel was your man, though he's dropped his name down to just Ash, and sometimes told people his last name was Blood, because he thought it sounded cool. Contract killing wasn't so easy as he'd thought it would be with a gun that couldn't miss, in part because it only worked for four hours out of the month. A man couldn't keep himself fed on twelve jobs a year, not even if they were big and flashy ones. Most of the time, when he wasn't setting up the next midnight job, he was living off the land, which was another way to say stealing.
He'd stolen his way onto the Noah III. A tall man in a white suit had stuck his ticket in his back pocket, and a brief distraction had opened the way for Ashton's deft fingers. He hadn't known the ship or the destination before he'd taken the ticket - he'd only planned to make a hasty exit from the city - but he'd heard that the Mississippi was grand this time of year, and north seemed as good as any other direction. The ultimate destination of the Noah III was further than Ashton planned to go, but the boat would do for a time.
Ashton leans over the side of the boat, watches the garbage floating in its wake, checks that his pistol is at his hip for the third or fourth time in as many minutes, adjusts his hat, pulls off a few leaves from his plug of tobacco and sticks it between his cheek and molars, checks his pistol again, and then starts scanning the other passengers. As the boat leaves the wharf, some of his tension fades - there was always a chance that the man in white he'd stolen the ticket from would arrive and make a scene, but that risk seems to have passed. There's something about the lions that's bothering him, though he can't quite say what. Instead, he starts looking for a likely woman to make conversation with, and hopefully something more. His preference would be for someone young and naive, but he'll take what he can get. Still, there's something about seeing the lioness that makes him reconsider the whole notion of women - maybe it's the thought of being torn apart.
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