Tsuiraku-town, part 2

[Hours]

[OOC: yeah, skip ahead}

[Graybeard]

[OOC: OK, so moving forward...]

Layla's ... enthusiastic ... response to seeing Ace (and her son) again is probably best left to the imagination, but it didn't keep her from realizing that with the arrival of what appeared to be friendly, or at least useful and employable, newcomers to the vineyard, there'd been a shift in the tactical situation.

"We've been going at this bass-ackwards, I think," she told her boyfriend, her mother, and anyone else who was listening. "We've been reacting to the people at the shack, and whoever their friends are, staking us out. What should be happening is that we should be keeping an eye on them. We have enough people now to do it. Anybody interested in setting up a stake-out of our own? One with some muscle behind it?"

[OOC: In case it isn't obvious, Interesting Things might be observed ... Incidentally, any suggestions on how to bring Ouro into this setting?]

[Jack Rothwell]

Jade sat on a stool in the corner in the room as Layla made her speech. She'd unseathed her longsword from it's scabbard and lain it across her lap. She unrolled her tools and started contentedly sharpening it's already razor edge to a keener point. The exercise was a soothing one, and it served the double purpose of giving her something useful to do while showing her claim of the skill to Ace to be legitmate.

"Anybody interested in setting up a stake-out of our own? One with some muscle behind it?"

Jade simply raised her filing hand to her brow and tipped a 'yes' in the direction of the woman before resuming the task at hand. Talking tactics could wait a while. It was better to listen and learn more about the situation for now.


OOC If anyone needs something fixing before the big dance now's a good time to talk to Jade. She owes a freebie or two. /OOC

[Graybeard]

Layla nodded approvingly. Good; at least one of the newcomers had some sand. Mother always said to lead by example, so... "You and I can take the first shift," she told Jade. "Mom, can you find someone to help on the second one? Fact finding only, no gunplay unless we have to. Whoever is behind that shack, they already have plenty of reason to come after us. Let's not give them any more unnecessarily."

Layla and Jade set off for the shack, and as soon as they were out of earshot of the house, a question seemed in order. "All right," Layla said. "Just who are you and what do you want from us?"

[Hours]

It's just a small operation, and they're being spooked by these people who are spying on them. Gault thought, keeping an eye out for anything interesting, Really spooked. They're holed in behind this many traps and defenses.

And the one thing that stuck out to his mind was that they hadn't apparently been doing all that much. They were obviously being spied on, and now their countermeasure was to... Spy back, when they obviously knew that they could find the people behind it, or at least a lead to it in the shack they were planning on watching and maybe ambushing anyone who came out. However they were watching for people who had been sending out invisible spies and the like who had managed to set up a sort of forward base right in their back yard, and quite literally at that.

The obvious solution would have been to just... Destroy the shack, obliterate anyone trespassing and send them the message to just never ever go near these people because that was what they were risking simply by being close to these sorts of people. Or if they were even more clever they could capture anyone they could and get information out of them and use it to carve a bloody swathe through this little town to get to the heart of the matter...

Gault sidled over to the one Layla identified as her mother and asked the obvious question, 'If you know where to find these people, why are they still alive?'

[Jack Rothwell]

Just who are you and what do you want from us?"

"You're a direct one. I'll give you that." She eyed the woman up and down. "Especially considering the somewhat suspicious circumstances you and yours seem to be operating under." Layla and Jade stood locking eyes for a few tense seconds; the mercenary shrugged and continued "I guess you have the right to be a little suspicious yourself, after all, a strange woman turning up on your property leaking like a broken tap is not an everyday occurance. I am who I say I am Layla; a merc by trade and a blacksmith when I can find the supplies, and I'm here because a merc without a job is useful for drowning their sorrows and little else."

They weren't too far from the shack now. It loomed in the near distance, looking more and more sinister the longer Jade kept her gaze on it. She stifled a shudder. "What about you?" her voice dipped in volume as they neared their desination "If you and Ace are running an ordinary vineyard I'll buy a hat and eat it. That was a room full of warriors if I ever saw one."

[Graybeard]

[OOC: Ah, time for some two-barreled exposition ... thanks for the opportunity...]

'If you know where to find these people, why are they still alive?'

Faye looked at Gault with what she hoped was a blandly neutral expression on her face, but her thoughts weren't so neutral. A little impetuous, this one. Where does my daughter keep finding these people? She tried to keep her voice neutral as well.

"Actually, we don't know where to find them. The man who was the caretaker here until we bought the place says the shack was just a tool shed until a week or so ago. Then it got emptied out, completely -- and somebody set up a miniature warp gate in it. We started to check that out --" she didn't mention that the checking-out involved Joe unintentionally using the gate -- "and then some bastard popped out of it carrying a Yuuki staff, one of those squad-level magic weapons the Tsuirakuan military has, and used it on a bunch of us on its riot-control setting. People who install portable warp gates seemingly overnight, and wave around Tsuirakuan military magic without actually being in the Tsuirakuan military, are definitely not people you want to just go in and try to shoot without knowing just what the hell they're up to and why."

----------

Layla was having a curiously similar conversation with Jade as they settled in to watch the shack.

"What about you? If you and Ace are running an ordinary vineyard I'll buy a hat and eat it. That was a room full of warriors if I ever saw one."

"Then go find a hat," Layla quipped, then got serious. "Actually, you have it just about backward. Yes, I'm with one of the guilds, don't ask which one, you're better off not knowing. No big surprise there, is there? Anybody in Farrel with any ambition either is part of one or is paying protection money to one or more of them. You probably know that, and trust me, it's better being the hammer than the nail. But the vineyard is completely legit, or at least it was supposed to be before all you people came along -- and before some asshole popped out of this shack carrying a Tsuirakuan military weapon even though he didn't look military at all, and used the damn thing on me. The guild wants me to learn some magic from teachers in Tsuiraku-town and so they were trying to set me up here -- and then all this other crap happened. There's another part of the story, too. A high mucky-muck in the Tsuirakuan homeland security outfit has been giving us these veiled hints about troublemakers -- Tsuirakuan troublemakers, if I read him right -- that he wants us to help him get rid of."

She raised a hand and stopped to listen for a moment; it sounded for just a second as though there'd been a noise inside the shack. After a tense minute or two, with nothing else being heard, she continued, but in a considerably lower tone of voice.

"Maybe it's just me, but I'm getting a bad feeling that we've got involved, very much against our will, in a Tsuirakuan conflict -- we don't know what yet, but it might be anything from a clan battle to preparations for a full-blown rebellion and civil war."

[Jack Rothwell]

Jade listened attentively and with an increasing, sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. Layla's talk of rebellion and war brought back a slew of bad memories not far enough in the past to be dimmed. Her hand lowered to the throwing knives holster and rested there of it's own accord.

"Civil war? Gods! And here I was thinking that our lands were overdue some peace and prosperity!" Their voices were barely above a whisper now, Jade crept in a slow-paced crouch up to the shack, leaned gently over and pressed her ear against the side of it. She held her position, listening intently for some sign of life but there was nothing but the faint creak of old wooden boards in the wind. She turned back to her accomplice, feeling her sadistic side rising up as it usually did before the violence began.

"If it IS the locals causing the trouble, do you want them killed, captured or a little from column A and B?" Her mouth pulled into a grin which had absolutely nothing to do with good humour.

[Graybeard]

"Civil war? Gods! And here I was thinking that our lands were overdue some peace and prosperity!"

"Whoa!" Layla cautioned. "Not 'our' lands here. Whatever they're doing, they're just Tsuirakuans, probably using Tsuiraku-town as a base in exile." The pieces were starting to fall into place for her: that must be why Kitaura was in town -- to investigate an insurgency that was growing in the concealment that Tsuiraku-town provided. Might Dasuke Kinabalu have had something to do with it, something that got him rubbed out when the parcel delivered by Rhett Courier got stolen? Or might the theft itself have had something to do with the insurgency? Who could tell?

She turned back to Jade. "It isn't the 'locals' in this rebellion, or gang, or whatever it is, at all." (Well, that wasn't entirely true. The man they'd captured who succumbed to a suicide spell had at least been Farrelite -- but clearly the Tsuirakuans were behind it.) "We're keeping our noses clean here in Rinkaiel." (Well, true for some definition of "we" -- but it wouldn't be so good to talk about what had happened with Fritz and Weed, whether it was authorized or not.) "And in turn, we haven't had any trouble with the locals, either." (If you ignored the little business of a bomb on the airship, at least, but that was probably planted by an elf -- wasn't it?) "We just need to figure out what --"

She didn't finish the sentence, however, because the shack was starting to emit a magical glow. Wraith reflexes took over, and she dove for cover...

[Hours]

'Hm. You would know what you're doing.' Gault made a point of adjusting his intonation to take on a sort of condescending Tsuirakuan lilt to it, 'Anyway, if you need some bodies to watch your back I can offer myself and a few of my men.'

Of course he wasn't doing this for free, it was obvious that he wanted something, or even that he was certainly getting something from this already. Gault was just hoping that the woman wouldn't question a jackass mercenary captain who wasn't asking payment and offering to stand between her and someone with the ability to incinerate a small army, and from what Gault had seen the Gewehr only had a small army, and they apparently trusted half of them just as much as they did him.