Session 11 - The Alyon Family Gauntlet

The central station in Saron, the heart of the city-state, the nexus for rail lines heading all across Ducorde, is closed. Entrances are roped off, police and soldiers alike standing guard and keeping watch. One of the platforms is a mangled mess of steel and railing, marked with blood spatters and scored with shrapnel from the initial explosion and the smaller follow-up explosions.
Casualties from the battle, one Ingrid Augurelt among them, have been taken to the nearest hospital. Luggage carts remain unattended. Trains sit, waiting for passengers that cannot come.
Our heroes sit to one side, wounded and harried, at least one of them now a survivor of a life-threatening battle for the very first time.
A simple visit on the way to a dangerous, magical wasteland has turned out to be anything but simple, and the task of keeping this group of librarians and students (and whatever lies in the past of one particularly sticky-fingered moogle) alive falls on the shoulders of the one person who has actual military training in her history.
With the aftermath of their first victory stretched out before them, we join our heroes preparing for what they hope are many more…
Isa puts her hands on her knees and stands; winded but unwounded, thanks to Sydney’s healers. “Right, so that was a shitshow. But we’re all alive, so that’s something. How’re you,” unspecified, “doing?”
“I’m okay.” Bast gives a small shrug in response, but glances at Yves with some concern.
“Um. Alive? Confused. Wiped out. I need either a drink, a nap, something small and fluffy to pet, or all three,” Linnet offers.
“Strictly speaking,” Yves says, “I am not having a breakdown.” He is still sitting on the ground, his fingers sticky from the cinnamon roll he consumed. With the lop ears, black clothes, and current expression, he appears to be a Bunny of Woe.
Orrey checks himself over and looks surprised and a little confused. “I think I’m…good? Yeah, completely fine, actually. Is that what you’re supposed to feel? You know, after…”
“After whatever in the universe happened to you. Didn’t you…weren’t you down?” Linnet looks like she still can’t quite believe she’s talking to Orrey. “Or am I crazy? That might be more likely.”
Isa shrugs. “Everyone’s different. If you start to feel differently, say something.” She looks around a bit. “We should probably be somewhere else soon, though.”
“I’m sorry, I really feel like your healer shouldn’t be the worst one off after a battle, but I used up all my reserves,” Linnet says.
“I remember a bolt of lightning, and then a weird fuzzy figure came and I was right back where the bolt had hit me. It’s all a little muddled,” Orrey says.
“Should’ve led with the whole lot, though.” Bast bites his lip, thinking. “Wasn’t expecting something like that here.”
“I mean, things explode sometimes,” Yves says. “It happens. Sometimes they just explode. It’s usually because someone did something wrong. I’m almost certain it’s not my fault.” He wobbles his way to his feet, sounding unusually calm. “It just happens.”
“Isa, I think we’re all ears whenever you have a plan. Bast, you might be on team Let’s Have A Plan. Pretty sure the rest of us are just waiting to be told which way to go,” Linnet offers.
Isa nods to Linnet. “Right now, my plan is Off The Street. Orrey, you said you lived near-ish? If the invitation still stands, that’d be great, but if you’d rather we put any remaining attention on an inn instead, I get it.”
“Well, after this I think we’d raise more questions if we tried to keep apart from Orrey. So no objections here. Unless this might make your house more of a target? But I don’t think we have a way to tell, at this point,” Bast says.
“It’s not far to the Oak Hill area. You’re welcome to have dinner with us and stay the night as well.” Orrey gives a hopeful smile, tempered by the battle a bit.
“Lead on, friend.” Linnet hauls herself shakily to her feet and dusts herself off, trying on a half-smile.
Orrey slings his backpack on a bit more securely and heads off down the streets, confidently leading the group through the twisting turns of the back roads of Saron.
Isa brings up the lead of the little group, head a-swivel.
Yves skulks along near the rear, squinting sometimes in the sunlight. Ugh. Sunlight.
Orrey eventually stops in front of a side street lined with apartment buildings, shops of every sort on the first level.
Bast pulls out a particularly hefty hammer from his toolbox and slides it into one of his deeper pockets before following the party.
“We’re in the third one on the right, above the shop with the sign of the flower loom.” Orrey looks around for anyone he recognizes on the street.
“…flower loom?” Bast squints at the sign.
Linnet has been dawdling by a bookshop, but she ceases window-shopping to gaze at the sign. “It’s so pretty!”
It takes roughly two seconds for Orrey to be recognized — Darby Elezen, six houses down and two to the left, helped mop out the kitchen when the water backed up six weeks ago. “Orrey!” he says, half-trotting over. “Where’ve you been?”
“Had a job to do! You know how it goes. How’re things in the neighborhood?”
“Oh, you know how it goes!” he parrots back. His eyes keep darting to Isa, then shyly at literally anything else. “Apparently your sister’s shop is going to be doing great, big order there just four days ago. Your mother was down here about an hour ago, you just missed her, she was passing out cinnamon rolls and getting the lay of things. Frederick said he’s going to bring some chocobos down to help get stuff out to the railyard a little easier, but everyone’s got an opinion on that, bird included.”
Isa looks back at Darby, expressionless.
Yves is staring off into the distance, hands shoved into the pockets of his hoody.
Orrey grins at that last. “Freddy! He’s always got some crazy scheme going. I hope it doesn’t end as badly as the time he was going to try sending things in tiny airships.”
“Hah! You know I found one of those just last week? Crammed up in the corner of the attic. No idea how it got there.” He looks away from Isa for a third time, and then spots the rest of the group. “Oh! You, uh, all of you with Orrey?”
“Yeah, they’re some friends I made on the way. That’s Linnet floating over there, Yves is the one who’s sort of out of it over there, Isa is the one with the sword, and Bast is the one with the toolbox. They actually just saved my life at the train station. CRAZY things are happening.” Orrey looks a little worried as he asks, “Has anything changed with things here? Is the war ramping up or something?”
“Oh, you were at the train station?” He lowers his voice conspiratorially. “You know, they’re saying that it was the work of the Hallowed, but a false attack to actually pin things on the Avengers,” he says, about an attack that happened about fifty minutes ago.
“They’re saying that, are they,” Isa says with her trademark flatness.
“I mean — they — yeah — I mean — s’what I heard.”
“Hm.”
Bast gives Darby a much more interested once-over, eyes narrowing in thought.
“Man, word travels fast around here. Did they mention anything about casualties, or anyone involved? Also, Orrey, what does your family do that would be reflected by a flower loom?” Linnet’s conversation is only slightly more disjointed than normal.
Darby shakes his head. “Look, we can talk about all that, sure, but right now you folks need to get inside and get off your feet and relax. If you saved Orrey’s life, you’re all right by everyone here, and there’s no reason to keep you up when a few of you could definitely use a good drink. Orrey, you taking them to see Mama, or setting up a bit out of the regular pathway?”
“Better take them to meet her, first. She’ll help with the rest of the bunch when they start swarming. Linnet, Mama Alyon runs the shop there. Papa always says she weaves cloth almost as well as she weaves her stories.” Orrey looks a bit melancholy mentioning his dad.
Darby ushers you all along the way, trying not to watch Isa as she leaves, and then he heads his separate way as well.
“Who was that?” Isa asks Orrey, as they head on.
“Darby? He’s good people. We’ve known him and his family for years. His cousin Fred hauls stuff heading out of town from the Hill. Delivers mail as well. Darby’s apprenticing with the weaponsmith, Hiron, lately, though he must have had a light day of it today to be out and about.”
Orrey leads the party through the door of a shop, behind the counter, up a flight of stairs, down a hallway, through a storage room that’s doubling as a room for drying painted miniatures, and on, through a winding maze of converted apartment rooms, through two buildings connected by a handmade sky bridge, and on, until he stops by a door that honestly looks like three of the last four you passed.
Yves, despite a lingering glance at the room full of miniatures, keeps up with the rest of the group.
Isa tries not to think of the nightmare that defending the building would be.
The door then opens before Orrey can say anything, and a stocky woman with thick brown hair, a handmade cloak, and a very, very sharp eye, pulls the young man in for a hug. “Orrey, you’ve been gone so long I thought I’d pull my hair out. You need to talk to your sister before she’s the death of me. Your other sister too! I don’t know what she’s thinking about — Orrey, you brought home guests and didn’t tell me?!”
“Hi, Mama.” Orrey manages to get out while being smothered.
“Honestly. Just like your father.” She turns a welcoming smile on the rest of the group. “Well, you’ll be staying with us for as long as you’re here. Any of you paired off, or are we scaring up four more rooms? Well, three, Orrey, you can sleep on the couch.” Mama Alyon is back inside without waiting for an answer, leaving the open door for you all.
“Brace yourselves.” Orrey heads in and looks around for the inevitable underfoot little ones.
Bast follows Orrey in, barely repressing a smile.
Isa follows Bast, girded.
Linnet settles painstakingly on the ground and follows the party, soaking in the ambiance and grinning.
Yves whispers sidelong to Linnet, “I could get a hotel room if they don’t have enough rooms here. Would it be rude to offer?”
Linnet whispers back, “Let Orrey’s mom bustle around first, and only offer if she’s seriously fretting over it. You’re fine.”
The Alyon home is full of handmade little things, each with a story behind it that Orrey is compelled to share; a carved bird made by his cousin, a painting done by another cousin, something that looks like an ashtray but is supposed to be a mug made by his little sister when she was eight, a newspaper headline in a frame that reads LOCAL COUPLE CELEBRATES TWENTY-FIVE YEARS that looks just this side of amateur.
At some point, tall glasses of water are distributed, and Mama Alyon begins taking names, professions, and personal interests. Yves is given the only black glass in the house.
Yves drinks his black-glass-encased water, and looks somewhat less in shock than before.
“Did you make this one, Yves?” The moogle’s grin is perhaps slightly wider than warranted by the question.
“No, but I could, uh, maybe I ought to take up glass-blowing, huh? For the, you know. Aesthetics.”
At some point, Linnet forgot to not float, immediately attracting the attention of several underfoot little ones. She’s still actively participating in the conversation, but she’s also doing some minor wind tricks for the kids and apparently loving every minute of it.
“Maybe you could use lightning to make some seriously crazy artistic glass stuff on a beach, or something!” Orrey says.
“Maybe? I’ve never been to a beach.”
“Creation from destruction. Order from chaos. Something like that.”
Mama Alyon settles in with her knitting, set up in her cozy rocking chair. Orrey’s six-year-old sister, a bundle of curly brown hair named Dalmah, is haranguing two much smaller children that look somewhat related to Orrey.
Dalmah’s curls stretch out and spin in a mini tornado. Linnet puts on her best “who, me?” face.
“Where are you from, Bast?” Mama Alyon asks out of the blue.
“The Triad, ma’am. Traveling.”
She seems to mull this over for a moment, and then nods.
Orrey gets up and paces the room a bit, glancing out the doors of the Gathering Room. “Anyone around besides Dalmah today? I’d love to tell you about how the trip went, as long as we’ve got the place to ourselves.”
“Your brother is over at the Linley’s tonight,” she says. “Your sister should be home soon,” she adds, almost as an afterthought that has an entire week’s worth of thought hidden inside it.
Orrey nods in understanding. “I’ll try to be quick. My friends know about Papa’s business trip. And they might be able to help us. I managed to get the latest task done, but like we’ve been worried about, it seems that no matter how long I do these jobs, the price doesn’t seem to be any less than it was before. We’ve got to do something else. Something a bit more…drastic.”
Mama Alyon raises her eyebrows, her knitting continuing apace. Dalmah’s giggles are the only other sound in the silence.
Isa sips her water.
Yves looks generically anxious.
“Have you heard anything new lately about his, uh, trip?” Orrey looks worried and hopeful at the same time as he runs his hand through his violently purple hair.
Mama Alyon starts to answer, but she and Orrey both tip their heads to the side, some tiny sound catching both of their attentions. A moment later, a voice a lot like Orrey’s, just pitched up a little over an octave, pipes up from outside. “Just in for a minute, Mama!”
“Come say hello to our guests, Cassiat,” comes a very sharp reply.
“I’m heading back out!”
Mama Alyon knits, looking somewhere past the needles, mouthing something to herself.
“It’s okay! We wouldn’t want to be any trouble.” Linnet puffs a little breath of wind into the face of each tiny child, provoking some distracting giggles.
“At least come say hi to me! Gosh, sis.”
The door opens with a pair of sighs, one from the girl pushing it open while stealthily rolling her eyes. Her dyed red hair is in two loose pigtails hanging down her shoulders, and she’s dressed in black pants with two belts around the left thigh and an olive leather green jacket with black detailing. She gives a thoroughly empty smile to the room, and then tries to carefully nudge a very stuffed backpack out of sight through the open door.
Cassiat Alyon does give Orrey an actual smile, and then the rest of the room a perplexed one. “Whoa. You have friends. A lot of them?”
Yves glances around the assembled crowd in the room. “…he does.”
“A handful, at least?” Bast smiles back.
Linnet waves and continues fulfilling the important function of Distracter Of Small People.
Orrey heads over and gives his sister a hug, looking over her shoulder at the backpack suspiciously. “What’re you up to with all that?”
Cassiat gives Orrey a very obvious God Shut Up look.
“Are you going somewhere, Cassiat?” Mama Alyon asks, already knowing the answer.
“Just… out,” Cassiat replies. “For a while.”
“Look at that, Yves, you’re out of water.” Mama Alyon stands up and takes Yves’s glass from his hands. “I’ll need to scrub the spots out of this glass and bring you some more. Cassiat, please keep our guests company until I’m back? I’m sure you have a lot to tell your brother about this last week.”
Yves gives up his glass, one ear rising in curiosity.
She trundles out of the room, leaving a very irked Cassiat behind.
Orrey smirks at his sister. “Better get it out quickly or she’ll keep you in all night. Anything explode this time?”
“Anything else?” Isa murmurs into her glass.
Cassiat looks around, tries to shift around so no one but Orrey can see her face, and gives up upon realizing that’s impossible. “I’m going to see Papa,” she says, trying to find a nonchalant way to say it and failing.
Orrey frowns at himself as he experiences a bit of a memory flash of the bolt from earlier. He shakes his head and examines her face, trying to figure out what she means. “You’re what.”
“If it’s that easy, then—” Yves stops abruptly, because manners. Among other reasons.
Orrey looks at Yves with shocked wide open eyes, and shakes his head slightly at him.
“I’m going to see Papa,” she says, curtly. “And then we’ll come home.”
Bast leans back in his chair, green pom bobbing slightly, and looks like he’s got all day to listen to the details.
“How are you going to catch up with him?” Orrey manages with only a slight pause before the word catch.
At the mention of Papa, the smallest child becomes agitated, and Linnet gathers him onto her lap and shushes him.
“I have—” Cassiat grabs Orrey’s arm and just hauls him out into the hallway, away from the others, though it’s easy for Bast to catch the door and keep it from closing.
Bast rests two fingertips against the not-quite-closed door, listening.
Once she thinks she has the privacy she needs, Orrey’s little sister continues. “I’m going to go get him and bring him back. I know he’s gone, and I know he’s in trouble. I don’t know what you all have been doing, but I know that you know and that Mama knows and that Gripala knows but he’s still not here so I am going.”
“You’d do, it, too. Not knowing anything you’d race off to find him. Of course.” Orrey smiles warmly at his sister’s enthusiasm, then it fades as he puts on the most serious face he can manage. “You’re right. He’s in trouble. But you need to trust me on this: I’ve got it handled. More…experienced people than you and I are needed to pull this off.”
She grins, with the confidence that only a sixteen-year-old has. “I’ve already got a secret weapon.”
Orrey looks skeptical.
“And besides, I’ve got all the stuff I need.” She taps her backpack with the toe of her boot. “I’ve got everything! Two weeks’ rations, a collapsible ten foot pole, fifty feet of rope if, uh, I fall in a fifty-foot hole, I guess…”
“What have you been reading?! Wait, a collapsible pole? Let me see!” Orrey exclaims.
Bast’s eyes widen as he glances back to everyone left in the room, trying not to laugh.
Yves does not call to the crack in the door that in a fifty-foot hole, allowance should be made both for one’s own height and for the requisite length used by knots. He might think it, though.
She crouches down and then brings up a small pole, one that extends out VERY quickly and smacks into the door an instant later. “Whoops! And I’ve got an airship already set. I’m leaving tonight, and we’re going to find Papa and bring him back. I’m not just going to sit around!”
Orrey laughs and shakes his head. “Now that’s something you don’t get to see very often. But, what is it for? Airship, what airship?!”
“Galeb has a ship. He’s been teaching me to help crew it. It’s small, but we can get around easily on our own, and we have a lead to follow.”
“How do you have a LEAD?! What have you been DOING?! I don’t have ANY leads! You need to tell me everything right now. In fact, collapse your pole and get back to the gathering room. You need to tell everyone in there. They’re here to help,” Orrey says.
It is at this point that Orrey and Cassiat discover that the pole knocked the door open and no one has bothered to close it.
Yves waves tentatively.
Linnet waves nonchalantly.
Isa toasts with her water glass.
Bast twiddles his thumbs with only a bit of exaggeration.
Cassiat, a little sheepish, comes back in. “Okay. I’m going to go follow a lead about Papa. I overheard a conversation while waiting tables last week about a train that’s running around Alterna every day. Apparently people are getting loaded onto that train, and they’re never coming back. Now I know it sounds like a spooky ghost story thing, but there’s a good reason why I think there’s something to this!”
“And that reason is?”
She reaches inside her jacket and pulls out a folded, yellowing piece of paper. She unfolds it on the couch, inviting everyone to crowd around. “See, it just looks like garbage and gibberish,” she says, her fingernail underlining pits of nonsense printing and words in a language and lettering that certainly isn’t standard. “But Orrey, look at the typeset.”
Orrey looks closely at the paper.
There is an instantly-recognizable alignment error in the capital W. “The guy said that this paper was all he could find, run over by the train wheel.”
“The guy?” Bast presses.
“The guy talking about it at the table,” Cassiat responds.
Orrey’s excitement rises. “That’s Papa’s work…where’d you find this?”
“Hm. And how did you get it after?” Bast asks.
Cassiat grins. “Well, he had a lot of other papers out — some sort of trade thing — so when I came to get his gil for the dinner, I just slipped it out of the stack and in with the receipt. No one notices a server, right?”
“Nicely done.” Bast’s smile grows to a grin. “And doesn’t sound like the setup for a plant. Interesting.”
Orrey shakes his head slowly, but decides not to play the overprotective older brother card, since Gripala is the one that does all that. “What did the guy look like? Did you hear his name or anything?”
“Big guy, like yay tall,” she says, holding her hand up a head taller than Orrey, “thick red beard, and I think he had a neck tattoo? He had a scarf on. Big into lattes. Anyway. Galley and I are going to go fly to Alterna and find the track. He can handle all the ship stuff, and I can handle any of the fighting!” she says brightly.
“You and what Dragoon army?” Orrey says.
“You know, I thought about being a Dragoon,” she says, nonchalantly. “But I’m a Red Mage now instead. I think it’s more versatile?”
Isa settles in her chair. “Versatility has its place. That place is normally far away from specialists.”
Yves acquires the expression of someone trying to figure out if they’ve just been insulted or not.
“Dwagoon! Jump jump!” Denryl, Orrey’s little nephew, proceeds to explain to Linnet in garbled sentences how he wants to be a Dragoon when he grows up.
“You are most definitely not going,” Linnet informs him, booping his nose. “Red Mage high-five! Well, distance high-five. Someone’s gotta keep the rest of these folks alive, after all.”
Cassiat preens. “And I’ve been one for about a week now, and it all seems pretty straightforward. And if it’s too tricky, I’ve got a good Sniper crystal on hand too. I tested it, don’t worry.”
“Uh huh. Sniper, right.” Orrey is getting a little more worried about her now. “And a whole week of training. Nice. You realize that it takes at least months to get even halfway decent at a single spell!”
“…you’ve got a what?” Yves asks, having lost the war to say nothing in case whatever he says violates a local custom.
“Crystals are shiny,” Dilara, Orrey’s slightly-less-little niece, announces to the room at large. This is a Very Important Fact.
“If you don’t mind me asking – how’d you come by the crystal?”
“There are many words I’ve heard associated with being a Red Mage. ‘Straightforward’ was never one of them,” Linnet mutters to Yves.
“A crystal,” she replies. “Two of them! It didn’t cost me that much. I’ve figured out the white/black balance thing, that makes sense. It’s all in getting a good rotation, right?” To Bast, she says, “Oh, a guy was selling them out by the station five days ago. I got the first two, fiddled with ’em for a few days, and then packed them up last night.”
“Hm. I don’t think we saw a vendor when we came in. Have you seen him since? I’m curious.” Linnet is doing her best to keep her voice and her face level, but there’s a vein near her eye that’s starting to stand out.
“Fiddled with them,” Isa says.
“…you… He was… They’re just… You’ve been…” It’s a good thing Yves isn’t drinking any water right now.
“Did he say where he had them from, by chance?” Bast asks.
“What?” She looks honestly perplexed. “It’s like testing all the instruments out in school before committing, right?”
“…in a sense…” Linnet mutters, mentally adding Not a ‘common sense’ sort of sense…
Yves pulls an ear in front of his face, covering one eye in sheer horror.
Fortunately, Dilara chooses that moment to go ask Yves forty disconnected questions, starting with why his ears are so long.
“Who is selling you random crystals?” Orrey says.
“I haven’t seen the guy since, but I also haven’t been back to the stations, I’ve been working. It only cost me about—” she speaks the amount in a whisper “—11,000 gil for the both of them, which Galley helped me with, and I know they both work, so it’s fine!” She shrugs. “Some guy. I don’t know, he had a vest on?”
Yves says absently to Dilara, “Probably because I didn’t drink enough coffee as a kid,” still trying to process this latest round of information.
Bast, in the middle of drawing a breath, coughs lightly as he hears the number and desists from further questions for the moment.
“Orrey, can I have a moment to the side here?” Isa asks.
“With me?”
“Please.”
Orrey closes his eyes and sighs in his sister’s general direction, then heads off with Isa.
Cassiat, confidently oblivious, scoops Dalmah up in an upside down hug.
Yves leans down to tell the child, quietly, “When you get older you can try all /sorts/ of interesting things, but definitely don’t try on a bunch of different job crystals you bought from a stranger at a train station, okay? Stick to the safer stuff!”
“…so, what did you do to test these?” Bast asks Cassiat.
Isa turns Orrey to something approximating a private corner, and whispers as softly as she can to him. “I don’t know your sister, but she’s going to get herself killed. What’s your plan to stop that?”
Orrey has it ready. “I’m going to tell my mom.”
“Set up some targets, cast some spells,” she says, holding a giggling child above the couch by her ankles. “Apparently you can cast them really fast if you alternate!”
Dilara nods very solemnly. “Okay. I be safe. I wanna pet Cactuar when I get bigger.”
“That’s much safer,” Yves tells Dilara. “Get thick gloves, you’re set. Maybe some needle-proof goggles too.”
Bast pulls his own goggles from a pocket to show Dilara by way of an example, and is promptly relieved of them as they end up around her neck.
“You’ll need train fare, too,” Yves says, “so that the train cactuar doesn’t get angry, which means… I’d have to check train rules for the local lines to find the optimal point for when you’re old enough to pet safely, but young enough to get discount fare. Maybe, hm, three more years? Four?”
Isa frowns. “And will that – again, I don’t know your family – actually stop her, or just make her more determined?”
“If anyone can reason with her, it’ll be Mama Alyon. When Cassiat sees something she wants, she goes for it, but she’s usually not this reckless. Could be the whole thing with Papa is setting her off down the wrong path.”
Isa nods to Orrey, and turns back to the room. “Yves, maybe you should go see if Mama Alyon needs help with that water glass. Cassiat, do you mind telling me about your…friend’s airship? I have some experience in that area and I’m curious.”
Yves straightens up from his conversation with the small child who has been warned away from a life of snorting job crystals acquired from dubious merchants. “I’ll go check,” he says, looking a little uncertain, and heads for the kitchen.
“Okay. Mama says I can’t have a Cactuar in this house, ‘cause there’s too many people and they don’t like spikies in their feet.” Dilara wanders off to the kitchen as well, either following Yves or just hoping for a cookie. She’s in that mode of conversation where it really doesn’t matter if you’re listening or not, she’s just happy to talk. (She’s still happily playing with Bast’s goggles.)
Linnet rocks a dozing Denryl on her lap, feeling the listening-to-scarily-stupid-ideas headache growing.
Cassiat brightens. Isa clearly knows her stuff, she can tell from the sword. “Galley’s ship is called the Slim Reaper. He bought it two weeks ago, we’ve been out on it a few times, he’s out on it every day. You can fly it with just one person, and it can carry about five, six people comfortably. It converts to a sailing ship easily, so you don’t have to find a formal airship dock. I think that means it’s good for smuggling, but he’s not talking too much about that yet. I know how to handle sails on the water and I don’t get airsick at all anymore.”
“YOU’RE DATING A PIRATE?!” Orrey stares, and then adds in outrage, “A SKY pirate?!”
“Orrey, please. Piracy and smuggling are completely different.” To Cassiat, “do you know the equivalent displacement? Radial thrust? What about armaments?”
Yves walks into the kitchen to see another viera in there, where definitely there wasn’t one before. This one is fairly short, female, glasses folded in the top button of her shirt, jeans rolled up at the cuffs and sensible walking shoes on. She looks apologetic. Mama Alyon looks a combination of frustrated and determined, that then wipes away to friendly host as soon as Yves enters. “Yves, please meet Lylja. Lylja is an associate of ours,” she says, leaning hard on ‘associate.’
Cassiat, blankly: “He does?”
Isa nods. “Great, I’d love to talk to him about it. I’m more familiar with the Cardian military fleets, of course, so it’s always interesting to see what other shipyards are doing.”
Yves ducks his head to yet another new person. “A pleasure to meet you,” he says. And to Mama Alyon, “I was wondering if you needed any help with the dishes, ma’am. Isa thought I might be useful here, while everyone else is….catching up. Or I could help you carry them, if you need another set of hands?”
Cassiat smiles brightly. “Oh, that’d be great! I know an expert coming in would be fantastic before we take off.”
Yves glances to the other viera again, then fixes a polite, helpful expression on his host.
Mama Alyon pats Yves on the shoulder and walks with him into the living room. “Unfortunately,” she says, raising her voice to add the others to the conversation, “I think we need to wrap things up.”
“Of course, Cassiat. I’m here to help, after all,” Isa says smoothly.
Lylja follows her in, a concerned look on her face, finding Orrey’s eye.
Orrey looks questioningly at her. And then sees Lylja and he starts breathing a little bit faster and glancing around for an escape that’s not there.
Mama Alyon gives Cassiat a strange, anxious look, and then gives everyone at large a calm and simple smile. “It’s a shame you weren’t able to stop in while you were in town, Orrey. Your little sister would have loved to see you before she left.”
Yves gives a tiny shrug of hope this is what you wanted me to do? toward Isa.
Linnet gives Yves a what the hell happened in the kitchen? look.
“Next time you’re through,” Mama Alyon continues, “I hope you can bring your new friends by.”
There is a sound, distant, of a door being shouldered open.
Lylja mouths a word, wide eyes on Orrey’s.
Run.