Tsuiraku-town, part 3

As we play, occasionally we'll close a thread and open a new one to keep the size of threads (and relative complexity) down to a dull roar. Here's where we store the closed posts from the history of Errant Road.
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Jack Rothwell
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Re: Tsuiraku-town, part 3

Post by Jack Rothwell »

[OOC Did Jade and Leo get a lift? I'll retcon some other way of getting to Tarver street if not./OOC]


A short while later Leo and Jade found themselves on Tarver street. The conman lead them into a narrow alley that held the entrance to his place of residence. He took out a key speckled with rust and opened the door.

"Gods. What a shithole." The blacksmith commented. Leo, as usual, was unabashed.

"It's just until things get moving. Cup of tea?"

"I'm fine thanks. Just get cleaned up and we'll get to the smith's. I want to get on with this project as soon as possible."

The hippy-haired merc went upstairs to make himself look respectable. Jade gingerly lowered herself onto the arm of an armchair that looked as if it had seen better days.

"You could've at least got a place in a more respectable part of town." She called after him. "And what did you mean by 'things getting moving'?"

Leo's reply was muffled, as if he was pulling something over his head. "Rufus is coming down in a few days. The old man was making a lot of noise about going legit and asked me to ease the transition."

Jade made a derisive snort, the idea of the old captain as a legitmate businessman bordered on ridiculous. The last time she'd seen him he'd been organising plans for a revolution in Lorrel. Plans which had fallen short for numerous reasons. Jade train of thought was derailed by the sound of sloshing water.

"So what exactly is his new plan then? Selling ice cream?"

"He wants to set up an agency." Leo shouted in reply. "You know, a place people can come to for security, bodyguards and the like."

"In Rinkaiel? There's a few places like that already."

"He wants to pass along that military stuff he knows as well. The old bastard doesn't have kids so I reckon this is his way to leaving some kind of legacy." There was a distinct dunking noise, Jade always got the mental image of a shaggy dog swimming in a canal whenever the merc was bathing; you couldn't fault his enthusiasm.

Jade was thinking of another question when a white ball of fur jumped onto the seat next to her and hissed. She let out an involuntary girly shriek and fell off her perch. She struggled back to her feet and muttering curses under her breath as Leo came thundering into the room, carrying a revolver and not much else.

"Are you ok?" He took in the scene and glowered at the obnoxious cat. "Keeko! Bad kitty!" He marched over and wringed out his wet hair onto the unsuspecting animal, which made a yowling cry and shot off to a darkened corner. "Sorry. She's hostile to new people, I should've warned you."

Jade looked back at the naked man in front of her with a raised eyebrow. "Well at least I know I can rely on you to protect me from domesticated animals. Come on hero, you need to get ready and I've got a sudden urge for a smoke."
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Re: Tsuiraku-town, part 3

Post by Hours »

Meha didn't respond to any introductions. She was just leaning back on the driver's board of the Schwarzmarine supplies wagon. As far as she was concerned there was very little about this that directly concerned her at this juncture.

---

On the other end of the connection to the Temple there was some faint voices that seemed to be coming from far away from the recieving crystal itself, he couldn't understand them, Gault sat on the line for a few nervous minutes before a voice came on to speak with him.

"Archmage Oshima will not be speaking with you. If you have something to say I'll hear it." The voice on the other end was thickly accented tsuirakuan. Sounded like an older man.

Something was fishy here.

'I took this crystal ball from a former employer's corpse when he was shot in the head. I never got his name.' Gault started, 'I don't know much about your operation but I do know you want nothing you're doing here to get back to your home country. I know you have an archmage level mage or maybe two there. And I know that you have a particular problem to do with Tsuirakuan homeland security sticking its nose into Farrel which is a major problem considering what you could perhaps achieve in their absence. I have a course of action for dealing with that, I thought you might be interested.'

The voice cleared its throat.

"A person calls us out of the blue who gives no name but boast of knowing much, has no references and offers us anonymous tips? If this is a trick it's a very bad one." He had a very good point...

'Well, consider it a trick if you like. But I'm not offering you an anonymous tip, since I want you to pay me a large amount of money or tradeable goods for this information. Secrets are a currency as valid as any silver coin.'

The voice exhaled heavily in a pained sigh.

"We have no reason to trust you. Let alone to pay you."

'That much of course is obvious. If you want to reconsider, then I'll meet you in my offices at midnight tonight. Schwarzmarine Contractors on Cetrega Street. Come alone or bring a batallion if you think you need it. I'll be waiting.' Gault cut off the connection, plucking the tiny crystal from the air and pocketting it. He headed downstairs and out into the small fenced off yard behind the offices.

'I suppose that went about as well as can be expected...' He vanished from view, moving at speed to vineyard country.
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Re: Tsuiraku-town, part 3

Post by Jack Rothwell »

Leo and Jade walked shoulder to shoulder down the grimy streets of Tsuiraku town. The merc had traded in the remainder of Martin Dashwood's costume for more respectable looking clothes of canvas and leather. The pair now looked like the mercenaries they were; although the renewed jingling from Leo's pockets declared them as a little too rich to be freebooters. Leo kept his head down as they passed the bathhouse that had been the scene of his arrest earlier in the day. The homeland security outfit were continuing their investigation, although with the discovery of the dud bomb their efforts seemed noticably less frantic as they accosted passersby for information. The duo carried on a little further down the road and ducked through the entrance that marked the small forge on Merchant's street.

The resident blacksmith looked up from the armour he was working on as they entered. Leo took the lead; Jade knew the man was more business inclined than she would ever be. He marched his way over and held out a hand. Jade took her time scanning the room as the man engaged in negotiations, taking in the firearms, blades and tools that adorned the cabinets and walls of the forge. The place was small but well equipped, certainly good enough for the operations she was planning. The sack in her hand made another crackling noise as if eager to get started.

Leo came over a few minutes later with a set of keys and pressed them into the woman's hand as the blacksmith made his goodbyes and left.

"Three days all paid for." He announced. "Mr Theobald says you're free to use the bits boxes and anything else you need except the comissions he's working on."

"Beautiful." She said. "Three days should be plenty. Now..." She went rumaged through her pocket and pulled out a key of her own. "There's a few things I left at the Mead and Drum that'd be a help for some of the fine-tuning. Could you go and get them for me? I believe you know where that that is."

Leo didn't bother to deny he knew where the blacksmith was staying, he took the room key with a sheepish grin and headed out.

Jade, now blessedly alone, stood for a moment and tilted her head back, exhaling a long sigh somewhere between fatigue and anticipation. She upended the container onto the workbench, spilling tubing, crystals and metal components in a pile.

"Right." She declared. "Now the real work begins."
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Re: Tsuiraku-town, part 3

Post by Graybeard »

"... And that's where we stand," Joe summed up as Peter listened via crystal ball. "The store is closed for at least months, maybe a year or more. The building took way too much damage to be occupied. I can look into getting it rebuilt if you want, though."

The Gewehr capo thought about it. "I'll have to ask the Council, but I think not. It sounds like we've been made by somebody in Tsuiraku-town, and we'll probably never figure out who and why. The damn Tsuirakuans can't even take a crap without there being protocols and rituals on the one hand, and intrigues and conspiracies on the other. We've never been able to penetrate them." (Joe had no idea that the "we" in question went far beyond the Gewehr.) "Best to find a cover somewhere else in town."

"Got it. So before moving on to a different subject, should we try to hit the bastard that torched the place? Ace says he got a good make on him. And should Layla look for magic lessons somewhere else too?"

Another pause. "There's really nowhere else where Layla can learn magic there," Peter said. "Just tell her to be extra careful. And yeah, it'd be good to hit the torch on principle, but don't put anybody at risk trying to do it, he's not worth the effort. So what's the other subject?"

"Well, we learned something interesting about that girl you told us to protect," Joe said -- but before he could finish, his attention was diverted by a creaking door somewhere close. Too close.

---------

At about that time, Faye was presenting herself at the Tsuirakuan consulate. "I need to speak to Captain Kitaura, please." The token she showed caused the receptionist's eyes to get wide...

---------

And Layla was discovering that her friend Galina had had a very unusual experience with the visiting arch-mage.
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Re: Tsuiraku-town, part 3

Post by Sareth »

So far, Jasmine had found nothing of interest, indicating what was up with these people. In fact, the absolute lack of anything interesting was interesting in itself. Usually farmers and the like had at least a few interesting items about. Guns to deal with pests, bottles for cold winter nights, things like that. But this place was so sterile it almost declared itself as having been sanitized. This in spite of the fact that virtually everyone had seemed armed to the teeth.

Something was seriously up.

With a sigh she grabbed the latch to another door, opening it. The door let out a loud moan. Since no one was about, Jasmine shrugged and walked in, quickly concluding the room had nothing in it save a guest bed and a dresser. She closed the door and reached for the handle on the next door down the hall.
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Re: Tsuiraku-town, part 3

Post by Jack Rothwell »

OOC It's too bad we don't have any new players in the mix. With all the separate paths being pursued it presents a lot of opportunities for people to get involved. Also, I think we need to figure out as a group where the Oshima and Seishi situation's are going and where they'll finish at. But, in the meantime.../OOC

BZZZT!

"Ahh! Damn it!" Jade dropped the screwdriver she'd been holding and sucked her fingers. She'd just freed a crystal from the network that represented the power source of the yukki staff and gotten a shock for her trouble. The rest of the twinkling shards made a faint whirring noise and went dark; finally safe to handle.

The re-design was going as well as could be expected. At least she'd remained uninterrupted thanks to hanging up a 'closed' sign on the door, that, coupled with her occasional curses, had served to keep any would-be interlopers away. The blacksmith had also dismantled a pair of rifles of a hefty, older design to form the casing of the new weapon. If all went according to plan they'd have something they could transport around the town without drawing attention to themselves (certainly nowhere near as much attention as a six foot, military grade weapon would draw) and present one hell of a nasty shock (literally) to anyone they would have cause to use it against.

The blacksmith broke off the operation to pump the bellows of the forge. She'd need to make a few new components to finish piecing the job together. The final touches could wait until the merc got back with the rest of her tools.

..........................................................................................

Leo had hurried back to the Mead and Drum a lot more steadily than he'd arrived on his previous visit. As he entered the run-down tavern he immediately caught an altogether different atmosphere than before. From the way the patrons were looking over their shoulders and talking in futive whispers he could almost taste it; fear. And no-one was marked more clearly than Dandelo the barman. The man looked pale as a ghost as he moved almost mechanically from one customer to the next.

The merc, never one to resist tugging at a thread, put his retrieval plans on hold and parked himself by the bar, waiting patiently until the barman came to serve him.

"What'll it be, sir?"

"A pint of Swoggle's old peculiar." He replied promptly. "Are you alright friend? You look a little spooked if you don't mind me saying."

"I am, sir. As you would be if the face of the company we had before."

"Really? What company would that be?"

Dandelo, who was as loose-lipped as a fishwife on a dose of truth serum, leaned forward and began blabbing about a certain Tsuirakuan and her escort.
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Re: Tsuiraku-town, part 3

Post by Hours »

Gault approached the Vineyard at regular speed from a fair way out, making sure to slow down in an unseen spot. He wasn't stupid after all. Reaching the vineyard he found that there was no one there worth noting. No one but Meha.

'What happened here? I thought I gave you an order?'

Meha sat up, 'They all went off on their own. They didn't seem to think of us as interesting enough.'

'Alright. Let's get moving then, we don't have any business here for now.' Gault hopped up on the wagon, riding shotgun so to speak as the schwarzmarine wagon clattered out of the vineyard's grounds. 'You get the message from Wallace?'

Meha handed Gault a wad of papers, the first few of which prominently held Wallace's bloody thumbprint on them, Gault read them through quietly as they rambled back towards Rinkaiel. When he was done Gault lit the papers with a match and scattered the ashes to the wind, you could never be too careful.

'Alright, so he got some answers but we're down one informant. What happened with the target?' Gault asked.

'He gave his real name as Leo Landau then went off, his girlfriend said something about getting started and mentioned tarver street.'

'Girlfriend?'

'The ginger dyke.'

'That's his girlfriend?'

'I thought it was obvious.'

'Well I'd never seen them together... Alright... So he admitted to meeting us under false pretenses, she was asking around about Layla, he was asking around about the Oshima family, we don't know who they work for or what they're after. They're officially suspicious. Not to mention an intelligence breach. I'll call the boys and we'll meet up in Tarver street.'

---

Briefly Martin may have been able to see a certain scruffy Tsuirakuan slinking out of the upper rooms of the Mead and Drum, after all. That was where all his belongings were. Good chance was he'd been kicked out, or was relocating. But he was leaving.

---

It wasn't hard to find the rented forge in tsuiraku town, mostly because there were very few forges in tsuiraku town. Tsuirakuans were mages and in general a proper artificer would just reshape metal to form tools with transumutation which was far cheaper and less messy than messing around with an actual forge and anvil, which left maybe two or three forges, one of which wouldn't have the neccessary tools for gunsmithing, which left only a very small number of opportunities, ultimately it was just a matter of tracking down the nearest forge and smithy to Tarver street and Gault's men worked out where the mystery blacksmith was lurking this cloudy afternoon when they heard the curses from inside.

Gault and Meha arranged the men around the forge, out of sight from the windows, some staying out the front, some circling round back, and once they'd done reconnoitering all possible escape routes, Gault walked straight in the front door with two of his men at hand, they'd pretty obviously forced the locks and weren't looking to be in any way polite, and it wasn't exactly a good omen that one of the two accompanying Gault was a certain short man in grey who now wore an eyepatch thanks to Jade's thumbnail.

Of course none of them had drawn weapons just yet.

'Miss Blacksmith.' Gault looked around at what she was doing, 'I was hoping we could have a little chat.'

[OOC: This post is so half assed but I don't care, it took three hours to write up.]
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Re: Tsuiraku-town, part 3

Post by Jack Rothwell »

[OOC I'll pen something up in reaction to this when I get back from work. Just a word of warning though, the homeland security is still on the same street as the blacksmith's and would take an interest in a bunch of suspicious-looking guys surrounding a local business, especially if a few of them 'obviously forced the locks' before they went inside.

And to raise an issue for debate; the comments about artificers I don't really agree with. I know Poe's shown things being created by magic in Errant story, but the idea of having someone with the level of expertise to create something as intricate as the smaller components of a gun out of thin air, or being able to conjour a blade with the correct level of sharpness to be ready to use would surely be a rarity among human beings, and unlikely to be cheaper than going to a gun/blacksmith. If that wasn't the case why would blacksmiths exist at all?

One of the things that bugs me about the fantasy genre is how magic can be used as an 'all powerful get out clause' when things go cockeyed or as a means of achieving stuff instead of innovating a more realisitic solution. And it's hard to know where the limits lie in the Poe-verse since there's never been an examination of an 'ordinary' mage in detail. Exactly how much power do these guys have anyway?

Thoughts people?/OOC]
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Re: Tsuiraku-town, part 3

Post by Hours »

[OOC: Mate... While I'd rather you didn't derail this with an argument, I'll just point this out: Tsuirakuan magic has an established method of transforming energy into matter, it's how warp gates work. I would think that it stands to reason that if you have a method of transforming energy into matter with enough precision to form a precise combination of atoms and the like to form a complete person with only a stated 0.3% chance of causing sterility (sterility mind, not being turned into a horrible blob of misshapen flesh), that you would have the capability to transmute metal into energy into gun parts.

If you really want to get into specifics, with the 'if magic can make anything then why do blacksmiths exist at all' I'd answer to you that where magic is prevalent that blacksmiths don't actually seem to exist. The most magic prevalent place being Tsuiraku where you don't actually see anyone slinging around a gun or sword, rather people wield yuuki staffs which seem to have been put together by an engineer or artificer as opposed to a blacksmith, or big ol' golems to hit things with. There aren't any blacksmiths there.

This however is Farrel, where blacksmiths and gunsmiths haven't been replaced yet because there aren't enough mages around to be able to have everyone armed up like tsuirakuans who have more powerful and more advanced weapons. Farrellians have blacksmiths and gunsmiths because they don't have artificers, because for them the gun and the sword is much more economical and easy to use for the non-magic wielding population which is still in the vast majority. Sure, the tsuirakuans are trying to give their closest allies the capabilities, which is why places like Layla's magic school would exist here, but magic is a skill which according to Impy's thread on magic takes a long time to be able to master it.

If you then question why tsuiraku hasn't started to make everything for Farrel I would answer because they don't think that guns and swords are worth much in the grand scheme of things, they come from the same magical tradition as the elves who let Jon into their high council with his gun on merit of 'it's not like it's even magical', with widespread magic comes the widespread ability to make a force field that can stop bullets with your mind, with increasing magical capability comes increasingly powerful individuals which neccessitates more powerful and more complex weaponry that likely can't be as readily mass produced.

So this is a tsuirakuan enclave, they have a whole bunch of mages, but they're still in Farrel. Thus why they have less forges and workshops than usual, or at least that's my reasoning behind that statement.

Also, I'm not sure if this applies but seriously?

:catgirl: ]
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Re: Tsuiraku-town, part 3

Post by Jack Rothwell »

OOC Who said anything about derailing the story? I was raising an issue for debate, that's all. I like to know where everyone's idea's are concerning stuff like that (still like to hear from Grey and Sareth if they have anything to add). You make a good point about the warp gate issue Hours, although I'd say there's a difference between taking an established structure of matter, taking it apart, moving it and putting it back together versus creating something new from a block of materials, although I reckon there's definite room for the idea of replication using an existing item as a template (seems like a more economical idea, don't it?). In any case, I doubt it'll become a major issue in the pass-along story, more interesting matters are at hand. Speaking of which.../OOC


Leo listened with widening eyes at Dandelo's recap of the events that had taken place at the Mead and Drum only hours ago. In particular the description of the certain client who had left with the Tsuirakuan and her escort. It wasn't exactly swimming with detail but sounded suspiciously like the bastard who had de-horsed the merc earlier in the day. Leo felt for his gun and tried to remember the last time he'd actually used it. He plonked a couple of coins down on the beer-sodden bar and made his way up the stairs leading to the first floor where the lodgers stayed in their cupboard-sized rooms. When he was sure he was clear of observers he drew the weapon and thumbed back the hammer.

"Oh, for the boring life..." He murmured. [OOC I leave it to you whether or not Seishi is still there Hours. Leo's main reason to come to the drum was for Jade's equipment after all/OOC)

..................................................................................................


Jade stiffened as she saw the man she'd mentally dubbed 'Mr Asshole' break into her forge with a couple of cronies in tow, she gritted her teeth as she recognised the one who made her security job so much more eventful that morning. Her blade was resting in a corner, but a cautionary hand dropped to her hip where her revolver lay while her eyes darted to the merrily blazing forge where a poker was heating.

"Can't you assholes read?" She snapped. "It says 'closed' on the door for a reason. What the hell do you want?"

Under the anger was a fair amount of fear of course. The looks on their faces and the tone in 'Bill's' voice were a long distance from friendly, and Jade estimated if it came to violence and she drew faster than all three men the chances of shooting them before she got ventilated were next to nil. And besides that was the issue of the homeland security they'd passed who'd doubtless hear the shots and come running.

The homeland security...

A cartoonist would've drawn a lightbulb over Jade's head.




[OOC. P.S. :catgirl: <----catgirl killing? Anyone want to create a catgirl character so we can use this?/OOC]
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