Volkanenborg

[AdamZero]

Not a bad punch, Were my first thoughts as I regained a proper stance. Not as much bitterness as my dad's hits. were my next. I'm gonna regret the tabs. Were my last before I was standing straight, my jaw swelling.

"Bether?" I managed, rubbing the sore to ease the pain and relax a bit. I smiled, through the pain, and Boris grumbled "Masochist"

I smacked the skull and it spun a bit, before it stopped suddenly. "hey are those two watching us?" Boris said as he raised a bony finger at a pair of mismatched persons.

[Sareth]

"Wah?" I asked, shaking my hand. Marcus had a pretty solid jaw. "Who?" I turned to look...

It did look like we were being looked at for a moment. But just as I was able to make them out, they turned and walked into a nearby inn. Something had looked fami...

Oh... Got it. She changed her hair. Apparently she wasn't content to just let her little whoopy drug stuff spy... she had to follow me personally. But that was something I intended to keep to myself, for now. I had no idea what the Eisenfaust was up to, and until I did, I planned to keep as quiet as I could about it.

"Nah. See? They're leaving." I smiled, grabbing Marcus elbow and turning him away, dragging him down the street. "Which is what I need to do. Look, mother knows I'm in town, and I am so not sticking around for her to remember to send out every friend she has to find me, drag me home, and stick me in a pettycoat to parade about in front of eligable and safe young men. Okay?"

[Graybeard]

"Peter wants me to what?" Layla said incredulously. Faye had been gone for no more than the 45 minutes or so it took to deal with Arty's remains, but that was long enough for her to have picked up some seriously weird stuff over at the shipping company.

"I don't understand it either," Faye confessed. "I do get why he's asking for you: it'll involve rope work, and even with a bad ankle, you're the best there is around here for that."

"Yeah, but I'm not so good with explosives..."

"Pish," Faye scoffed. "Just connect cable A to timer B and bomb C, set timer, fly away. Nothing to it; Zachary could do it, if he could walk."

"Fly away? Now how am I to manage that? I don't have wings, and I'm not a magic user. Come on, Mom, this is starting to sound ridiculous!"

"I hadn't got to that part yet. Peter's making his own private airship available for this, complete with ... Ace."

"Oh." Layla subsided to digest this bit of news, as her view of the job underwent rapid change. Peter's private airship was legendary among the Gewehr. Few outside his inner circle had even seen it, and fewer still had ever flown on it. Layla had had a teenage crush on its equally legendary pilot ... She was still thinking about this development as Faye resumed.

"Don't worry, this one should be easy. You won't even be gone overnight if you get cracking on it right away. And think of it this way: when we do finally get to Mountain of Madness, it'll save us fighting through the crowds..."

[Viking-Sensei]

Lucas was feeling decidedly fly-like as he stepped into Saiko's parlor. The entire room looked like someone had ingested some of the Rinkaiel region's famous mushrooms... no, the "other" mushrooms... and then let their imagination bleed all over the walls and floor. Right now, he focused on not letting his eyes bleed.

It's not that the individual artistic pieces were bad, it's just that instead of having some common theme, the entire arena was a mis-matched jumble of artistic styles and influences, all placed within striking distance of one another. A illuminated glowing ghost-tube sign from a bar flickered radiant orange and blue advertisements for a local brewery next to an ancient dwarven sculpture depicting one of their various demi-deities (a precursor to the elven set, no doubt) doing something indecent to a sheep. The clock on her mantle appeared to have melted, and was now dribbling all over a painting of what appeared to be cans of stew.

"Alright, Mrs. Mesuinu." Lucas said, casting his gaze to her (as, by comparison, she was the least harmful thing to stare at in the room). "What can I do for you?"

[Graybeard]

Still handsome, Layla thought as the tall figure waved at her from the empty-looking field on the outskirts of town. Remarkably handsome, in fact. But when did he grow old?

Ace's fine features had changed in the ten years since she'd last seen him, but if anything, the change was for the better. The boyish features of back then had acquired some new lines and creases, giving him a distinguished, wise appearance, without losing any of the energy she'd seen in his face when she was a smitten schoolgirl -- well, maybe just a little of the fun was gone, but still. His hairline had receded slightly, but no problem, that; it merely displayed the fine forehead of a thinker. He had a tidy beard now, flecked with salt and pepper. And he was still fit and trim as ever. Layla quickly calculated, he must be in his early forties by now. And if I can just age like that ... wow.

"It's just wonderful to see you again, Layla," he said as they hugged. "I'm terribly sorry to hear about Arty. Believe me, I know how much it hurts. You probably know that I lost Lexy a while back, to that bad trouble happening over in Veracia. It hurt and it hurt and it hurt, but eventually you --"

"Wait a minute," Layla interrupted as her head swam. "You -- lost -- Alexis? Did I hear you right?"

The man looked confused for a moment, but then comprehension dawned. "Yes, she was -- Oh, wait. I forget that you've been gone from here for a while. You probably didn't know that I married your old childhood best friend, three years, four months and eighteen days ago... and I still keep track of the days." He was smiling gently, but she could see a bit of moisture in his eyes ...

And then she was weeping herself, and Ace was weeping too, and for a long moment in time, they were consoling each other as best they knew how. But the moment passed, and Ace said, "Whew. Better pull myself together here. We need to get moving." He took two measured steps back, reached into the air, and made a hand gesture that looked like reaching for a handle that wasn't there, giving it a tug.

With a loud click, a stairway appeared in midair, reaching to within about a foot of the ground and ending eight or ten feet higher, going nowhere in particular. He took two steps up the stairs, held out a hand, and said, "Here, let me give you a hand up. This is probably a little spooky if you haven't done it before."

Layla looked around her, not quite sure she believed what she was seeing and doing. Then she steeled herself, took a deep breath, gripped Ace's hand, and walked firmly up the stairs, into the invisible airship.

[Graybeard]

[OOC: Sorry to follow myself up here, but in the interest of keeping things moving ... /OOC]

Mr. Stagpoole let himself back into the nicely appointed room at the inn, thinking we may be taking opsec just a little too far here. This would all have been easier if he'd been able to include Elke in the conversation with Peter directly, but it wasn't to be, so ... "Peter says he's arranged something to distract that outfit," he told Elke as he fiddled with his suitcase, disarming the poison-dart trap. "He wouldn't tell me what it was, but he did say we shouldn't count on going up to Mountain of Madness for a couple of days. Fine with me."

"Yes, we're comfortably settled here," Elke agreed. "May as well make the most of it. Want some champagne?"

Mr. Stagpoole smiled and started to turn around, but something in the corner of his eye caught his attention.

Elke's clothes were all piled on a chair by the bed that she was lounging in.

Which meant that she wasn't wearing them.

"Hey, we're registered as though we're married again," she laughed as he turned further and verified by direct observation what he'd only deduced before. "I'm even wearing the ring. I repeat: may as well make the best of it."

Mr. Stagpoole grinned widely and began to unbutton his own shirt ...

[OOC: And, per Impy's instructions, fade to black. ]

[AdamZero]

(ooc: part of me wants to get a commission of that scene... meh. Evil assassin on evil assassiness sex.)

I shrugged as we made our way out of town, only afterwards realizing that we were north of it, between the town and the mountains.

"Well..." I managed to scratch my chin, damnit my arms were stiff. "Want to go see what the big deal is about this park? We might get there by nightfall...but I hear these places are great at night, all sorts ghost-tube stuff hanging on walls and the like."

I rolled my shoulders to ease off the tension, still uneasy about how ragged my body felt.

"...Boris do I still have tents in your head?" I queried.

"Aye, boss." The skeleton answered.

"Well we can rough it if we have to." I said to Jamie, trying to smile, DEAR GOD WHY DID EVERYTHING HURT?! Then I fell over.

[Sareth]

As Marcus keeled over, I watched. it was something like watching a tree fall, you just kind of stare, even if it's falling right at you. When he finally struck the ground, leaving Boris staring strait into the sky, I broke my gaze away to stare at my fist. "Woah... Some sort of time delay?" I looked back down at Boris. "What the hell?

[Graybeard]

"Wow," Layla said as she climbed into the small but comfortable cabin of the airship. Maybe it was invisible from the outside, but inside, all was obvious, with three contoured seats, large windows for viewing what lay below, and even a small cooler that might have contained some drinks, although she wasn't going to indulge. (Work to do on the outbound trip, and she wasn't going to breastfeed Zachary second-hand beer when she got home.) No, this was a time to just marvel at what she was seeing... "If I hadn't seen the stairs, I don't think I would have believed that this thing was here. Where did Peter get it? Dwarven technology? Some ultra-high-level mage thing from Tsuiraku? Do you know?"

Ace chuckled. "I asked him once, using almost exactly your words, and he just smiled and said I was better off not knowing. And you know what it usually means when Peter smiles. Now get yourself belted into your seat. Invisible or not, I want to stay as close to the ground as I can, to avoid magical detection or a breakdown or whatever, and it's gonna be bumpy for a while, until we clear the ridge." Layla complied and settled back to enjoy the view, although in fact, she didn't really know what Peter's smile meant.

-------------

Grope paused in his tracking of the feral goat that was to make his (and Chippy's) dinner, hearing something he didn't recognize. Actually, he didn't so much hear it as feel it. Something large was approaching the ridge from the south, making a low humming noise coupled with the rustle of leaves on the wind -- very big leaves. It rushed overhead as the noise built to a peak (still not very loud), then vanished to the north. He couldn't see it, but he was sure something had passed overhead.

Wonder what that was? Grope thought, suspecting some manner of Small Ones mechanical marvel -- his people might have thought it was a wind spirit or a demon, but he'd come to know the Small Ones' technology well enough to believe them capable of such a thing. In any event, it didn't try to eat him, so he quickly put it out of his mind and resumed his hunt.

-------------

"Okay, it should get a little smoother from here, until we're close to the mountain," Ace said, interrupting Layla's awed inspection of the terrain rushing by below. Was that a troll she'd seen as they crested the ridge? Couldn't be ... had to be a trick of the light.

"Good," she answered as she loosened her seat belt. "I'd like to do a dry run on the setup here. You know what the carpenters say: measure twice, cut once. Would you mind acting like a block of plastique for me?" she asked with a smile.

Ace smiled back; like most of the Gewehr people (except, of course, for that minority of not-quite-Wraiths like the late Clem who resented her quick advance through the ranks, not realizing that it had to do with the talent that she had and they didn't), he quite liked Layla. "Sure, I can drive this thing with one hand." He made a show of holding the other behind his back, as his passenger extracted the cable and mechanical timer from her pack.

"I assume we'll want to put this little package on about a five-minute delay, to give me time to get back to the ship and us time to get out of blast range," she said, as much to herself as to Ace. She hooked one set of alligator clips to his index finger, getting a brief wince from him (and suppressing a chuckle of her own ... was this man a wimp when it came to owies?), and the other to the timer. "Okay if I use that time for our dry run, or will you need your hand back before then?"

"Sounds right," Ace said. "We can unhook the clips when there's a minute left and watch for OW!!"

A soft but sharp CRACK filled the cabin as the timer, hooked up and activated no more than a couple of seconds earlier, discharged a burst of electrical energy, straight through Ace's finger. There was a momentary blue glow around the alligator clips that passed, leaving the smell of ozone in its wake.

As Ace cursed, more startled than injured, Layla asked herself, did I do something wrong here? But then she looked at the timer -- and saw that it was still ticking, with four minutes and fifty seconds left to go.

[Viking-Sensei]

Saiko closed her eyes, then pressed a small button on the side of her belt. Her horribly gaudy outfit suddenly vanished, replaced by a fetching business suit with skirt that would be standard ware of any number of sane individuals. Instead of wearing high shoes, it now appeared as if she was wearing some sort of scaffolding on her legs to make her much taller. All in all, she looked like an entirely different person... which, coincidentally, she was.

"Annika?" Lucas asked, suddenly realizing who it was standing before him. "Is that... you?"

In one deft manuver, she hit another set of buttons on the side of the stilt boots, releasing her legs from them. She tumbled forward into Lucas' arms, where she took the opportunity to lay a series of passionate (though not always well-aimed) kisses on him, at least a couple hitting his lips. "Oh, thank god! I didn't know if you'd get the message! I'm so glad you came!"

Several of the gears in Lucas' brain fell out, and it took him a moment to put them back in. "The... what... who... what the... what message?"

The young (well, relatively so, compared to her Pseudo-Saiko guise) girl took a moment to look surprised as well, as she pulled herself upright and started trying to look more dignified after her momentary emotional overload. "You... didn't get the message and come running to my side?"

"Er... no." Lucas admitted sheepishly. "Sorry. I've been out of the office for a few days now with a tour group. We just deflected here on our way up to Rinkaiel. I paid my nephew to stop by every few days and forward any messages sent to my office to Bob, but I haven't gotten anything. So either he hasn't been yet, or he got distracted... again... and forgot to come in and do it. I'll probably get a big block of messages transferred to us next time Bob can sync with the network. But hey, I'm here now... start from the beginning... what's going on?"

"It's Miss Saiko! She's... she's been kidnapped." Annika broke down crying, and again collapsed against Lucas, grabbing his lapels and crying into his shirt. "Some big tough guys broke into her office two days ago. This was a professional operation - they managed to bypass the Chip-Net Spy System and beat down three of the best park security agents... two battlemages and one retired gunman from the local mob. The security footage from inside her private office showed that she killed one of the attackers before they managed to stun her."

"Oh, Lucas!" She sobbed, looking up at him with big wattery eyes. "The ransom note they left said that if we don't hand operations of the park over and leave town, they're going to kill her! The deadline is tonight at midnight... I couldn't call the police... the regional cops are all corrupt, that's why Miss Mesuinu hired her own private security force for the park and city... you're my only hope!"