Rinkaiel: Kidnappers

For in-universe game play. Journey through both familiar and foreign settings, explore lost ruins and forgotten cities, and try to bring light to the darkness of the world... or, you know, blow stuff up. Either way.
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Jack Rothwell
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Re: Rinkaiel: Kidnappers

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Jade rushed to the rail as the airship pulled away, pumped a fist in the air and let out a whoop of triumph. Leo watched her, smiling in what might have been pain. She wheeled around to her face him, beaming.

"I think that counts as a successful operation!"

"Apart from the shrapnel in my arse, you mean?"

"You'll be fine." Jade replied sharply, but not without sympathy. "We've got one of the mechs, intact. We've got our poor researcher friend's notes. If we can get this back to barker lane and I can start putting something amazing together."

"Just as long as I'm five or six miles away when you decide to turn that thing back on." Leo retorted, exchanging a knowing look with Layla and Ace. "Although what's really concerning me right now was the sudden appearance of airships exchanging gunfire over the same town we made the discovery. What do you think Layla? Something for us to be concerned about?"

"You should worry more about whether any of those researchers or the merc's they hired spotted us when we were running away." Jade tone grew distracted as she began resuming flipping through the notebook she'd acquired.
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Re: Rinkaiel: Kidnappers

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Layla cast a critical eye on the swag the Silver Hands and Ace had brought from the underground site. It wasn't what she'd hoped for, but it would have to do. "Anything you can work with there, Mom?"

Faye did the same. "I'm not sure," she answered. "Let's see what we can pry out of Jade's hands and take it from there." That didn't sound all that promising, but Layla noted that before the chaos started, her mother had made a quick pass through the woods at the edge of town, looking for ... ingredients. Her personal kit now contained a selection of mushrooms, fungi, beetles, and so on that produced hideously dangerous toxins. That at least suggested that she saw hope. (It was good, Layla reflected, that Zachary wasn't yet able to navigate well enough to get at those packets; he was getting into the "everything goes in your mouth" stage, and that ... wouldn't turn out well with this collection.)

Taking advantage of the distraction provided by the Bonny Read, the airship flew east.

[OOC: Fast forward back to Rinkaiel, I presume?]
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Jack Rothwell
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Re: Rinkaiel: Kidnappers

Post by Jack Rothwell »

OOC Go for it. Sorry i haven't been around lately./OOC
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Re: Rinkaiel: Kidnappers

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[OOC: Done, so ...]

Back in Rinkaiel, Layla repeated her question. "Anything you can work with here, mom?"

The two women surveyed the odds and ends they'd been able to bring back from the dwarven site (and wrest away from the eager Jade). "That looks almost tailor-made for it," Faye said, pointing at a remarkable contraption. It was on casters and stood about 30 inches high, with a hose coming out of what was probably its backside. A container was set into the front surface of the thing, for what purpose Luminosita alone knew ... but Faye could, er, repurpose it.

She extracted a bag full of mushrooms she'd picked while waiting for things to develop at the dwarven site. "These little babies," she said proudly, "are just ideal for undetectable poisoning. I should be able to whip an extract from them that we can rig this thing to shoot out as a powder, or if they try to use it to cook things in that container, get into the broth. When eaten or inhaled, it'll close your kidneys a full week later. Absolutely nothing to do about it known to modern medicine, by the time you show symptoms it's too late. Most who eat the things die. Those who don't are debilitated for the rest of their lives. All from mushrooms that you'd think would fit just perfectly into a stew, don't you think?" She smiled broadly.

Layla saw the -- ambivalent look on Ace's face and patted his hand. "Never criticize Mom's cooking," she said, rather unnecessarily.
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Jack Rothwell
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Re: Rinkaiel: Kidnappers

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In the entry room of the Barker Lane guild, things were going as smoothly as expected.

"Watch the doorway!"

"I AM!"

"If you drop this down the stairs I'm not putting out tonight."

"Yeah dear. No problem dear."

"Why should I care?" Eve muttered, irritated at being roped into heavy lifting so soon after returning from her cargo escorting job. "I'm not getting any action from anyone anyway... also, I'm not gay."

"Need a hand?"

"Yes Bert. Thank you." Jade replied, looking up from her anxious watch on the guild's latest acquisition as the young man scurried to the tomboy's side. Since they'd sneaked the thing off the airship and back through town (something which had cost a large amount of camoflague, bribery of inquisitive militia and time spent rolling it through the quietest routes they could find) the blacksmith had been unable to keep still, fairly hopping from one foot to another even as she grasped should plates with Leo and lowered it down the groaning steps that led to her forge.

"This is going to be great." She panted. "If I can get this up and running we could use it for guard duty or escort jobs or construction or..."

"JADE!"

"What?"

"Can we discuss this after we've put it down?"

OOC Leaving this open as to whether Layla and co are there./OOC
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Re: Rinkaiel: Kidnappers

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[OOC:
Jack Rothwell wrote: OOC Leaving this open as to whether Layla and co are there./OOC
I would have expected Layla's group to go back to the farm, but it needn't be so. Let's say it went that way unless something else comes up. /OOC:]

"It'll take me a while to get the toxin ready," Faye said. Layla left her to her work.

She turned to Ace, patting the dwarven artifact. "One thing we still have to do is to figure out how to get this thing into Orpiment's hands so it can kill him." (Ace marveled; his girlfriend had delivered that statement as though she was talking about delivering a box of books, not a killing machine. Then again, she was a Wraith.) "Do you suppose you could disguise yourself as..."

Ace didn't wait for the remainder of the sentence. "No."

"I was just joking, silly," Layla smiled, and administered a kiss.
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Re: Rinkaiel: Kidnappers

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"Right... now what?"

"On the workbench. It's a damn good thing I had it reinforced."

The task was accomplished with much cursing and shouting, and finished with a loud metallic thud as the mech rolled onto the table like a heavily armored soldier onto a hospital bed. Jade beamed with excitement.

"Right!" She exclaimed brightly. "Honey, I need a big pot of coffee."

"Yes, oh light of my life." Leo replied wearily. "With sugar?"

"Enough to make the spoon stand up. It's going to be a long night."
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Re: Rinkaiel: Kidnappers

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"So what do you think that other airship was all about?" Layla asked her mother. The toxin had to "cook" for a while before it would be ready to apply to the artifact, so they had time.

Faye considered. "I've been wondering that myself. Maybe a consult with Peter is in order." She retreated back into the house, leaving Layla sitting on the porch, nursing her son, with Ace beside them.

A few minutes later, she reappeared, a most peculiar look on her face, one that expressed utter, complete mystification. "He said he doesn't know, but not to ask again." The look got even more puzzled. "And then he said 'thank you.'"

[OOC: On to morning?]
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Jack Rothwell
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Re: Rinkaiel: Kidnappers

Post by Jack Rothwell »

OOC Sounds good./OOC

Leo awoke to an empty bed with a feeling of disappointment but not surprise. Jade had waved him off sometime around midnight with a promise of 'just ten more minutes' which he had heard before and would doubtless hear again. The mercenary had fed his cat, threw some clothes on and made his way back to Barker Lane before the sun had fully cleared the horizon.

The new door was, mercifully, squeak free. If it was one thing Leo had learned about the people he'd been working with over the last several years it was that Rufus and Eve were most definitely NOT morning people, and waking them early was a surefire way of being the subject of short-tempered rebukes and even outright verbal abuse for the remainder of the day. Fortunately, moving stealthily was something the handsome aristocrat had mastered some time ago. He made his noiseless way down the stairs to the forge with a tick of a smile on his face.

And there she was. Jade. Slumped over her workbench and the gutted mech in an unladylike slouch; her chest rising and falling with audible snores borne of awkward positioning and a mother-lode of caffeine which had led to the inevitable crash. It was a familiar routine for the couple, and Leo watched her with love before sidling quietly to the stool she was perched on and whispering in her ear.

"Jade?"

"Mzzzt."

"There's a couch upstairs."

"Yhhh."

"I'm going to carry you up to it, okay?"

"Umm...K."

Leo slung the woman's arm across his shoulder and lifted her like a groom carrying his new wife across the threshold of their new home, he managed the narrow stairway without (thank all the Gods) bumping his girlfriend's head and causing a rude awakening which would've cost him even more than waking Eve. A minute later Jade was laid on the couch under her duster with a cushion under her head. Leo planted a kiss on her forehead and went to the kitchen to cook his breakfast.
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Re: Rinkaiel: Kidnappers

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The next morning:

As usual, Layla was up with the sun for her morning run. (Well, not quite with the sun; Ace had managed to, one might say, extend the night for her just a bit.)

As she stretched prior to taking off, something was bothering her, like a thing half-seen at the edge of one's field of vision, or a sound just below the threshold of perception, or an odor she wasn't sure was there. She did a quick check of her surroundings, couldn't find anything wrong. She didn't bother to check for concentrations of magic, an error she would soon regret, although in certain regards it wasn't an error at all.

Well, maybe it was just a reaction to the creepy dwarven ruins, she thought as she set off. Twenty minutes later, she was back on the porch, starting the cooldown from an otherwise normal run. By now there was a light in the kitchen window. Good, she thought; Faye too was an early riser, and she'd be starting breakfast. Hopefully, though, it wasn't at a point that couldn't be interrupted, because Layla's discomfort was increasing.

"Mom?" she called. "Could you step out here for just a minute? Something doesn't feel right, and I'd like to take a quick look aroOW!"

As she paced the porch, she'd run into something large and unyielding -- and invisible. Wraith reflexes took over, and she dropped, rolled, and came up in position for some hand-to-hand fighting, wishing she'd packed a pistol on her run.

"That will be unnecessary, Ms. Sorensen," Captain Kitaura commented calmly from somewhere behind her, as if she wasn't startled enough when a pair of battlemages carrying Yuuki staffs became visible in her path.
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