Well look at this!  It looks like this story is set in the past, as you probably already knew.

The big, brutish man you see before you has served the kingdom in battle for many years, and has retired from war to train new potential members for the Royal Elite Guard (or, the army, for those who don’t make the cut.  He’s also the local blacksmith, so he stays pretty fit.  Plus, check out his sword.  You can actually catch a glimse of this guy during the main story on Page 219.  I still have not yet named him.  Any ideas?

You can see I wasn’t exactly good at making a background look lively back then (not that I’ve gotten much better) but in my defense this was created with deadlines looming.  I rushed to get it into the Drunk Duck Anthology, which after all sorts of turmoil took something like two years to get published anyway.