Tsuiraku-town

[Graybeard]

"I wonder if there will be any sides for lunch."

Having heard the rest of the "conversation" as well, Faye and Joe looked at each other, rolled their eyes, suppressed chuckles. "Ah, to be young and innocent again..." one said sotto voce to the other, and it didn't really matter which one said it.

They turned their attention back to the kitchen. "Truthfully, I'm getting a bit hungry," Faye admitted. "I just don't trust what he's doing in there, though."

"Nor I," Joe agreed, "but I know what you mean. Look, why don't you go ahead and eat? I can get something back at the place, and I assume you've got some things here that I can, uh, stand by with ... right?"

Faye nodded, appreciating the euphemism. "My dresser, top shelf, on the right." She went into the kitchen as Joe went back to extract a small kit from where Faye had said it would be, containing a number of bottles, labeled in a code that only a Gewehr would understand.

Those who had occasional recourse to poisons needed occasional recourse to antidotes.

----------

I'm just sure that was Rhett that I saw in that thing, Layla thought as she drove back to the vineyard. The flying raft had been some distance away, but her eyes were good (if not as good as that bitch Barb's, she grumbled to herself), and the man was pretty easy to recognize. But who were the other people? She'd have to look into that.

As she pulled into the lane, a most appetizing aroma was coming from the main house. The noodles had been filling, and she wasn't particularly hungry, but you just had to notice a smell like that. Had Faye found a cook for them while she was running errands? Her mother seemed to be getting very much into this winemaking business, but Layla didn't think they were quite ready for that yet. Well, there'd be room for discussion. "Hi, Mom," she shouted as she breezed through the front door and headed for her own bedroom, where Zachary waited in his playpen ...

... And as she went, she saw the kit that Joe was extracting from her mother's room.

Oh.

----------

The park was small by the standards of Farrelian cities, but enormous by the standards of Tsuirakushiti. It stretched for possibly a quarter of a mile along a stream that ran through the Tsuiraku-town district, no wider than a hundred yards for most of its length, but widening out slightly where the flying boat had come down. Benches and picnic tables in the Tsuirakuan style were littered about its grassy areas. Birds sang in the trees, and ducks paddled in the stream. An observant eye might have noticed some magical wards glowing softly on the latter -- Rice wasn't the only food-stand operator around whose cuisine was, ah, practical and eclectic -- but somehow they didn't seem out of place.

A street urchin approached the four men as they stood discussing the preliminary results of their explorations. "Ah, yuz guvs be needin' a boy to be watchin' your wee boat, while ye be goin' inta the town?" he said, in an accent neither Tsuirakuan nor Farrelian. "I be good at thet sort of thing, and this park be not so safe f'r the likes o' yuz."

[Kincaide]

"Get lost kid," Whitley growled at the urchin but a look from the Captain made the last syllable stick in his throat, "What Cap? You serious? This kid ain't no saint."

"Neither are you Whitley, which is why you are going to take him for a ride around the park while Rhett, Tristam and I look around," the Captain replied, "If something goes wrong I'll fire this off," Ritter reached into the dinghy and pulled out a flare gun which he stuck into the back of his sash.

For his part, Whitley accepted defeat graciously, "Come on kid," he offered the boy a hand up into the dinghy as Tristam jumped out easily. Rumor had it that Captain Ritter had busted Tristam out of prison a long time ago as part of a mission for Sylvan, Tristam stuck with Ritter as a sign of gratitude. Whether or not this was true was another matter entirely. Regardless, the whip thin man did not talk much but had the eyes of a hawk behind that curtain of unkempt dreadlocks.

[Viking-Sensei]

Neverinal laid out the spread on the large dining room table, doing up a proper gourmet feast. No plates or silver, he wasn't sure who all was coming, but he did his level best to make the food look as appetizing as he could.

Then, in an extra show of civility, he slipped on the makeshift pair of pants that Faye had so generously worked up for him. He didn't take the sheet off - however it slipped from toga to almost cloak, now gathered about his shoulders and held in place around his neck by a chicken bone (cleaned) that he'd laced through the two sides (mostly for dramatic effect).

He was just about to call for everyone to warn them the food was ready when a sound rose up from the other room - "Hi, Mom," he heard, followed by a door thump closed.

"Ah, the real lady of the house returns." he muttered to himself, leaning into a doorway and watching the figure disappear up the stairs. "Aha, so it is Andrea. I thought these grapes tasted familiar. But if this is Rising Moon... I'm not in Tsuiraku, I'd remember being drug through an ocean. Where the hell am I?"

[Sareth]

Mya blushed "well if I am not supposed to tell you it was I'm not sure what to tell you then, I've never really had any suitors before it is a bit hard with the no seeing people thing." Actually Mata did have many suitors just that two very over-protective younger sisters generally chased said love interest off before Maya even found out. "I wonder if there will be any sides for lunch."

"Uh..." I decided to wander into safer territory. "Well, it's chicken, right? Maybe some good mashed potatoes or something. You'd have to ask him..." I watched as Neverinal laid out a spread on the table. Noting that he seemed inclined to serve a number of folk, I decided it might be time to make myself politely scarce. "Speaking of food, I should go check on Nera. It's the proper, motherly thing to do!" Besides, mother still had my stuff hostage...

[Graybeard]

Have I seen this elf before? Layla wondered. No elves had passed through the vineyard in Kiyoka, and her only known dealings with elves until recently had been ... professional. He looked a little like some journalist she'd seen back at Rising Moon, doing a spread for a foodie crystal-net magazine out of Tsuirakushiti, but that had to be coincidental. Didn't it? The reporter was human, not elven. Wasn't he?

She slipped easily into the prepared answer. "I'm not Mrs. Samuels, and this isn't Rising Moon," she said. (Both were even true, sort of.) "Andrea Samuels is my sister, though. I'm flattered at the association; she makes very good wine. We're on the outskirts of Rinkaiel, just getting this place set up, and we haven't picked a name for it yet. How does 'Bad Ass Wine' sound to you? And by the way, who are you, and what are you doing here?"

She didn't see Faye wince at the proposed name for the vineyard, but she really wouldn't have cared if she had.

----------

A surprisingly heavily muscled Tsuirakuan was watching, making no particular attempt to conceal himself, as Whitley whisked the whooping boy around the park.

[Kincaide]

As Tristam and Rhett wandered around the area Captain Ritter caught the eye of the man watching his boat rise into the sky. He sauntered over to the man, "Quite a sight ain't it?" the Captain started, "A chance to be free of all the nonsense that goes on down here," a surprising amount of philosophy from a man the looked like he chewed rawhide for fun.

"Cap'n!" Rhett called over to Ritter, "Didn't bring you along to make nice with the locals,"

"Yeah, yeah, yeah, quit complaining boyo. You keep it up and I'll take my little boat and go home," he looked back at the man, "Kids these days, always in a damn rush to get nowhere,"

[Viking-Sensei]

"Allow me to introduce myself." Neverinal said, sweeping low with a bow, his cape-sheet-robe billowing dramatically. "Neverinal, of the Cimmerii. I am a wanderer, a lover of all things food and drink, and occasional professional death artist. I'm sorry for mistaking you for your sister... I know it sounds cliche, but after a time all you humans start to look alike, and since I encountered her and now you at vinyards, it did lead me to wonder.

I came to be in this location through a series of events beyond even my fullest capacity to explain... however someone around here has been using some very nasty death magics of my design and their actions are what brought me to this location indirectly. My pants did not survive the trip, so I had to request a woman - judging by her structure, perhaps an older sister of yours - make me some emergency pants, as she was starting to stare.

I'm more than a little concerned about whoever is liberaly abusing my magic, but I fear I cannot tell just by examining the body who the caster was, however if an individual were brought before me and with appropriate compensation I could easily confirm if they had been casting that sort of magic. Death tends to stain one's... energies."

As he talked, Neverinal held up a stick... no, a vine, just a small withered segment, probably pruned from one of the plants as it did not look all that healthy. Sparks flew from his fingertips up the vine, and for a second it flourshed, leaves spreading and grapes developing in a mere moment. He plucked one off and ate it with obvious enjoyment. "You're going to have a good crop this year... fancy a preview?"

[Graybeard]

[OOC: this isn't going to go the direction you expected, I suspect...]

Rather dumbfounded (a state in which she rarely found herself), Layla blinked at the inexplicable elf, the wheels turning in her head. "Nice to meet you," she said to buy some time. "I'm Layla, and Andrea is my older sister -- older by about fifteen minutes, if I understand correctly. We're twins." Did elves get the concept of twinning? She didn't know, but if this guy had been around as long as the elves were supposed to have been, it wouldn't have been the first time he'd been exposed to it. "Let's step into the garden and talk."

She forced herself to mentally replay the epidemic of death that had been going on around her recently. Death itself was no big deal to a Gewehr Wraith, of course; if you were told someone needed to die, and were given money to make it so, then you went out and killed them, and then got back to your day job. However, the Wraiths generally didn't do either mass murder (lots of deaths at once) or serial murder (lots of related killings in sequence). Both were bad for business. They attracted scrutiny from exactly the corners of officialdom that normally were content to let the guilds run the security and protection rackets, rather than expose themselves, because if the body count was too high, the guilds became part of the problem rather than the solution. Even the three yahoos up on the pass would have posed a real problem in that regard if the Gewehr hadn't been the corners of officialdom. They weren't so "official" here in Rinkaiel.

The replaying done, she reached a decision. Without being sure exactly how she knew, she was pretty sure that the one specific death that had summoned this alarming apparition was that of the field "worker" with the suicide spell. However, it wasn't the one that interested her, and besides, Rhett was on it, for whatever reasons of his own. But Fritz and Weed...

"As for the death magic, funny you should bring that up," she answered neutrally. "As it happens, yes, there has been a most disturbing outbreak of death magic affecting my employees ... and while the most recent one is already being investigated by an expert, two others are not. I think we very well may have need of your services. Tell me more about your rates and what you can do." Mom said that Peter doesn't want us to hit this "Marcus" character, or even get close to him ... but if an elf hits him, what are we to do about it, after all?

---------

"I am not sure that is safe," the muscular man said to Ritter, in accented but grammatically correct Veracian; Tsuirakuan was clearly his preferred language. "If that boat were to strike any of the buildings around the park, there might be -- unfortunate consequences."

[Kincaide]

Ritter snorted, "Bah, Whitley has sailed that dinghy in worse conditions than a placid day over a park. The man used that same dinghy to make several sea rescues during a proper typhoon despite my orders not to. Wouldn't have put that boy in there with him if I wasn't sure he'd be safe," the Captain returned what he perceived as a jab against his crew with, "Don't know how they train helmsmen in your homeland but ours pride themselves in their ability to not hit buildings,"

As he spoke the dinghy came in for a somewhat dramatic landing, skimming over the water and scattering the ducks. Whitley could be seen laughing at their upset honking. The dinghy came to a halt a few yards away from Rhett and Tristam. Rhett jumped out of the way, worried about getting hit but Tristam simply stared the dinghy down as it came to a stop. Rhett cursed at Whitley but the heavy-set man only laughed more at this.

[Graybeard]

"Don't know how they train helmsmen in your homeland but ours pride themselves in their ability to not hit buildings."

The muscular man eyed Ritter with the same kind of reptilian expression that Kitaura often displayed.

"As they do in ours," he said, and walked off without awaiting a reply, a gesture that anyone who knew the Tsuirakuan culture would recognize as a contemptuous dismissal.

[OOC: VERY belated retcon here, because of some things we've learned about the Errant World time line and some things that happened in other threads. It doesn't affect what follows, just avoids a timing problem of no significance to this thread.]