The ways of the Hunters
The pearls are a way to calculate how many kills one Hunter has made.
Deaths are to be confirmed by a Cleaning crew. Corpses are preferable,
to be beheaded or have a stake driven through the heart as a
symbolic gesture of the old ways and in honor of the Hunters gone
before them, but other signs of deaths are valid as well since today's
ways of killing are much more scientific.
The pearls are usually worn as rosary beads. Some Hunters always carry
it with them, others have them hidden where they live, or kept by their Church.
Usually the pearls are white pearls, but they can be of any other stone
or gem, preference by the Hunter. Every new Hunter orders a string of pearls,
usually starting out with a number of fifty. Each confirmed
kill allows them to remove one pearl. When – or rather if – they manage
fifty kills in their lifetime, they are free to either stop living as a
Hunter, leaving the Church without any strings attached, or
take up the Cloth and become a Father or Mother to the new Hunters.
So far no one has managed the feat of fifty pearls removed before their death.
The black pearls Voodoo carries are rare, handed down from his mentor who
got them from his, and so on. The black pearls start at a number of one
hundred and seventy-five and speak of a tradition and an honor
system, which details are only known by a few chosen ones. The black
pearls are only handed down in the event of death.
Voodoo's pearls were handed down to him from his mentor, Ruben Lilac,
who had managed to reduce the pearls from an unknown number to the
thirty-one that were on the rosary when Voodoo got it. It lies
now on Voodoo to have the rest removed. If he manages it, he is free to
leave despite the fact that he hasn't killed all fifty of a standard rosary.
If he doesn't, he's to mentor a new Hunter in the ways of their kind and
see to it that the tradition lives on. Such is the tradition of the black pearls.
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