Tsuiraku-town, part 2

[Hours]

[OOC: Yeah, it works. Sorry for the whole slow replying bit but right now I'm presently working from public internet kiosks and the like so I have about 10 minutes at any given time to try and type together a post.]

The two others rose to their feet and moved to haul their friend out from the floor, his eye was bloodied up and he'd have a lump like an egg was trying to force its way out of his skull for a while but otherwise most people from that particular group had had worse.

The muscular man picked up his bludgeoned friend and slung him over his shoulder, while the woman shrugged and said something along the lines of 'at least it was just him' and 'never seen an inn mug its patrons before', and lastly, that he'll want to bring all the others around to get some payback, so they'd best get Captain Gault to make sure the crew stay in line.

[Jack Rothwell]

Jade watched the trio go. She wiped a trickle of sweat off her forehead, silently thankful the violent man's companions had decided against getting involved. The clinentelle, now that the spectacle was over, returned to their drinks with an increased buzz in conversation. Jade pushed back to her feet and made her way to a stool at the bar, massaging a tender spot on her throat that the fighter had managed to get a hand to. Dandelo didn't need instruction, he placed a lukewarm glass of cider in front of the blacksmith as she sat down. Murmuring a 'good job' as he returned to polishing (or at least smearing the stains over a wider area) the glass he'd been working on. Rosh clomped back to the back room that passed for his office, jingling the bag of coins in his hand that Jade had thrown him.

"We're getting all types in here lately." The barmen commented.

"No kidding." Jade took a deep swig, breathing in the scent of fermented apples. "Where'd that rabble come from anyway?"

"A ship, as far as I can reckon." The rag made a squeaking noise as it pressed against the glass. Jade made a face. "Queen Anne's Reverence or something like that."

"Bloody pirates."

"Indeed. Although they weren't the most interesting clientelle we had last night."

Jade leaned back and took a measure of Dandelo; this was the man at his best. All she had to do was sit and nod along until the man said something that was worth hearing. Usually the scrawny bugger would ramble on about farmer's wives and back alley deals of no real interest to anyone but this time he struck gold early. He leaned on the table and beckoned her closer with a conspirital look in his eye. She obliged, trying hard to ignore the reek of grime that clung to the man.

"Kentauro Kitaura."

Jade's eyes widened. "The Captain of.." she realised she was yelling and brought her tone down to a whisper "The Homeland Security Captain?"

"Yeah."

"What in the seven hells was he doing in this dive?"

"No idea. His behaviour was pretty weird as well. You remember that bard I told you about?"

"What about him?"

"Kitaura tipped him."

Jade made a snorting noise that was halfway between amusement and pure disbelief. The Homeland Security Captain giving a street performer money out his pockets? And in the Mead and Drum of all places? Either the intimidating official had had a sudden desire to mingle with the unwashed or something very peculiar was going on. She found herself thinking about the situation at the vineyard, a memory tugged at her, what was it? Something Layla had said.

"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."

"Well, well."

"Well what?"

"Just well, well." Jade sat in silence for a moment, then got back to her feet and started heading back to the stairs.

"Where are you going?"

"I need to see a woman about a conspiracy."

[Graybeard]

'You're more likely to get some retaliatory action here meaning you can do something nasty with the portal and catch a few off guard, light a giant bonfire on it and see how they like teleporting into flames or similar.'

"Now why didn't I think of that?" Layla and Faye exclaimed at the same time, and looked at each other with big smiles on their faces.

There followed an exchange between mother and daughter that proceed at such a fast and furious pace that Ace, who was watching with equal parts amazement and amusement, occasionally lost track of just who was saying what when. Wish I had a bag of popcorn for this, he thought...

"We don't have to take out the Tsuirakuans, do we? Just the shed!"

"Right! Take it down, and no more threat except what comes in across the fields and roads, and we know how to defend against that!"

"Think a gallon of fuel oil will do the trick?"

"Fuel oil? Let's do this right! Never send a girl to do a woman's job..." (Ace noticed that both women were giggling at the "modification" to the standard aphorism.)

"So explosives, then?"

"Let's! Do you think five pounds of plastique will be enough?"

"Five pounds? That won't knock the shack down, it'll send it to the moon!"

"And what's wrong with that?" More giggling.

"But we really don't need plastique, do we? Won't fuel oil and fertilizer do as well?"

"Sure! And we can get that without arousing any suspicions, since we're going to need both out here anyway once we start the presses!"

"Agreed, then! We can go into town and --"

Ace chose this moment to raise his hand. "Uh, ladies, excuse me if I interrupt, but something just occurred to me."

Both women had been starting to hyperventilate, but they turned to him anyway, and Layla said, "Yes?"

What a family dynamic here, Ace thought. The notion of marrying into this family was ... interesting ... He got back to his point. "It's all well and good to wipe out the shack, but are you sure that taking the shack down is going to get rid of the magic gate inside it? Do high explosives work on magic?"

Once again, Layla and Faye looked at each other, and once again, they said exactly the same thing at the same time.

"Hmmmmm ..."

[Hours]

Gault just watched along as the two gewehr shot back and forth with their exciting new ideas (that he had initially proposed) and waited. That was what he considered to be a pretty obvious answer to this problem and to an extent had managed to put it into the back of his mind that at least they would have thought of this, but... They didn't.

'You don't need to destroy the thing.' He said, mouth full of bread, 'Just render it inoperable, if you can't destroy it then you can just bury it, a lot of people in tsuiraku don't like the warp gates because they're so risky and painful, they transform you into energy and shoot you somewhere else where you reform, and it doesn't work both ways... So the way I see it if blowing it up doesn't work you just dump a bunch of rocks or something on it so that the coordinates the thing operates under relate to the inside of a giant stone, I'm not sure exactly what it'll do but magic going awry isn't really known for being safe or pleasant.'

'Once you've got that done you just need to make sure that the platform is secure from outside invasion and can't be cleared, then you can start actually hunting these bastards down at whatever temple they're holed up in. They'll be like trapped rats.'

[Jack Rothwell]

Jade walked back across Tsuiraku town freshly rearmed and with Rosh's curses still ringing in her ears. Her would-be boss hadn't been to pleased about her leaving him high and dry without security. Jade had patiently pointed out that the troublemakers where gone and that the bar was virtually empty but it had done little to appease the big man.

She picked her way through the streets lost in thought as she ran over the information Dandelo had told her. If there was a big picture to see she was having a hard time seeing it.

"Sparechangemiss?"

Some beggar with a slurring Tsuirakuan accent so thick it could've floated a brick asked the question. Jade barely broke stride as she passed the dishevelled, lanky haired individual who was slumped against a hovel of a hut.

"Get a job, you bum."

She strode onwards to the vineyard, the beggar watched her go.

[Graybeard]

'Once you've got that done you just need to make sure that the platform is secure from outside invasion and can't be cleared, then you can start actually hunting these bastards down at whatever temple they're holed up in. They'll be like trapped rats.'

The suggestion hauled Layla back to reality.

This guy is more bloodthirsty than a newcomer to the Gewehr, she thought. Blue hells, even Ozzie wasn't this anxious to start a big fight. The memory of Arty's brother, now known as Brother Ohmad of the Malletarians (and, unknown to Layla, deceased in the volcanic eruption), sent the usual shiver down her spine. To even bring him up distantly, in the context of an action Layla was thinking about taking, was usually a pretty good indication that that action was very, very misguided.

Something else struck her. I'm veering again. Five minutes ago I was all ready to hunker down and get help from Kitaura. Thirty seconds ago I was abandoning that for a pre-emptive strike with plastique at this man's barest suggestion. And now I'm getting talked out of that by remembering a psychopathic brother-in-law. Focus, woman, dammit! And as she obeyed herself, she got yet another idea ... and this one looked like it might survive contact with reality.

She turned back to Gault. "I don't know that that's practical," she said evenly. That's putting it mildly. "Tsuiraku-town is too big, and there are more hidey-holes for them to escape into than there are for us. But you're on the right track: hunt the rats down in their nest. The question is, who are the rats, and where's the nest?"

Faye, who'd been slightly slower to come down from her plastique euphoria than Layla, cast a questioning look at her daughter as she stepped out of the room and back into the vineyard's business office, to emerge a moment later with a piece of paper ... and now Faye understood. A smile spread across her face as she recognized the bill of sale for the property. "Shall I baby-sit?" she asked, knowing what her daughter was thinking.

"No need," Layla said as she gathered up Zachary. "Looking like a young couple checking out the housing market is going to be part of the cover. Come along, sweetheart, we have some house hunting to do." She took the bewildered Ace's hand and started for the hack.

[Jack Rothwell]

Jade was only a hundred yards from the vineyard when the cart carrying Layla and Ace passed her heading the opposite direction. They waved, Jade tilted a hand in reply and fixed what she hoped was a geniune looking smile on her face while she mentally cursed and visualised punching a kitten. She took a deep breath.

'Alright then, the older woman. She should be able to shed a litle light on this mess.'

She was composed when she arrived, picking her way carefully acround the 'defensive measures' to give herself more time to think. She stepped into the safehouse and saw the fourty-something man the troll-thing has called Bill parked on a couch and chewing what appeared to be a lump of bread. Which did nothing to ease her state of mind. Mercifully, Jade spotted Faye taking her ease in one of more comfortable chairs the living room had to offer. She made her way over and stood until the woman turned her attention to the merc.

"So tell me. What exactly did you learn from Kitaura?"

[Graybeard]

"So tell me. What exactly did you learn from Kitaura?"

Faye considered for a moment whether to respond, then decided in favor. Jade clearly had a dog in this fight now, and Kitaura hadn't exactly sworn them to secrecy, just "discretion." (Truthfully, she was a little surprised that the man hadn't tampered with their memories, given his reputation. Then again, maybe he had. Who could tell?)

"He's actually on our side now," she said, sipping her coffee. "As we had guessed, there's some kind of internal conflict going on among the Tsuirakuans. The people who keep porting through the shack are on the opposite side of the conflict from him, and since we've, ah, accidentally been involved in a few deaths there, he's decided that we're helping him. He put us up for the night in return, since there was supposed to be some nasty new weapon getting deployed through the shack. I think what you people saw last night was the weapon, and I'm puzzled at it because it wasn't all that nasty, we've run into one like it before and she -- it wasn't nasty at all. He said it had 'unknown capabilities' or something like that, so maybe he was just playing it safe."

She paused as a stray thought crossed her mind. "You know, I almost get the idea that he was more interested in having us be on his side than we are in having him on ours. I have no idea why, and like the old proverb goes, the enemy of my enemy is not necessarily my friend. Anyway, it was a friendly encounter, if a weird one." She sipped her coffee again. "So what have you learned while you were in town?"

[Jack Rothwell]

Jade couldn't keep a surprised expression from surfacing as Faye gave her the information, more from the fact that the lady had simply told her what she wanted to know rather than what it was she knew. The display of trust certainly wasn't lost on the blacksmith.

"So what have you learned while you were in town?"

She parked herself in the seat opposite and cleared her throat before giving an answer.

"Well...umm. Kitaura turned up at The Mead and Drum yesterday. Dunno if you know the place, but the Captain was slumming it to put it mildly. On top of that he actually tipped a musician who was performing there; no-one knew what to make of that. I figured if he was wandering around my place of work it might have something to with those Tsuirakuan troublemakers. He certainly wasn't there for fun."

She patted the pockets of the longcoat she wore and found what she was looking for. She gave a silent prayer of thanks that she'd still had half a tabacco pouch left in her room at the tavern and began constructing a roll-up.

"If that bastard is on our side it would certainly make things easier. By the way, do we have a plan yet for the shack?"

[Graybeard]

Faye listened silently to Jade's description of the encounter in the tavern, wishing she knew more of Tsuiraku-town bars, and of Kitaura. Truthfully, she didn't know much of either. They hadn't been in town long enough to make much sense out of the way Tsuiraku-town worked, and while Layla had had some interactions with the Tsuirakuan Homeland Security people back in Kiyoka to learn more about Kitaura, Faye hadn't been there. She'd have to wait until her daughter got back before digging much deeper into this story.

Well, she could at least answer the question. "If that bastard is on our side it would certainly make things easier. By the way, do we have a plan yet for the shack?"

"I think 'that bastard' is as on our side as we can hope for," she replied. "The side he's really on is the Tsuirakuan government's. The people at the shack -- aren't. Most likely they're at least a dissident faction, and maybe planning an outright revolution. And here's something to think about." She watched Gault out of the corner of her eye as she continued. "With all the power of Tsuirakuan officialdom behind him, Kitaura doesn't feel like he can move against these rebels or whatever they are, at least not openly. If he doesn't have the power for that, we damn sure don't. I think my daughter has figured out a way to do something about it via indirect means, though: cut off the head, and the body dies. If I understand her correctly, she's off trying to figure out where the head is, without getting called to its attention."

---------

Faye had it just right. At that very moment, "Mr. and Mrs. Kondrial" and their remarkably cheerful infant son were meeting with a certain member of Farrelian officialdom, such as it was.