Session 12 - Cut to the Chase

Fresh off successfully not dying — for the most part, at least — in a sudden battle at the train station, our heroes traveled through Saron to find a safe place to stay. Orrey directed the party to his home in the north of Saron, a series of apartment buildings shackled together by a series of never-ending repairs and construction, a warren of hallways and converted rooms.
There, they met Mama Alyon, Orrey’s commanding mother and matriarch of the Alyon family, and then Orrey’s sister Cassiat — a few years younger, a fair bit more spirited, and even wetter behind the ears than their traveling historian artist.
Before the group could really settle in, and really sort out who exactly was selling Cassiat advanced Job crystals and telling her she could test them out, a visitor came to see the Alyons — Lylja, a viera that Orrey immediately identified as his contact to the people presenting themselves as Avengers, the ones that had his father hostage.
Mama Alyon directed Orrey to bring his friends by another time, for the first time, as if they’d never come, and Lylja gave Orrey a mouthed word of wisdom:
Run.
We join our heroes… right then, in fact.
Orrey and Cassiat look at Lylja in synchronized open-mouthed shock.
Linnet sets the sleeping little boy on her lap down in the chair they were occupying, retrieves Bast’s goggles from the wandering chatty little girl, hands them back to him, and glares at Lylja. But apart from some soothing nonsense to the children, she says nothing.
Yves snaps the latch on his satchel properly shut, and then bolts for what appears to be the nearest exit without further discussion. Doesn’t have to be told twice, this boy.
Isa makes the connection with the sound of forcible entry, and spins a look around the room. “Orrey, lead them out. Cassiat, help get the kids safe. Bast, do not blow anything up. If we get separated, meet where Sydney’s set up camp.”
Bast shoves the goggles into a pocket, snatches up the toolbox, and looks for a way out away from the noises.
Orrey snaps his fingers. “We can get out through the hallways! It’s a maze, no one will ever be able to find us!”
Isa doesn’t draw her sword…yet. But she does move to the door closest to the noise and lean against the wall to the side of it.
Cassiat shakes her head. “The window! Speed! If someone’s coming they’ll just go through the maze, not navigate it!”
Yves realizes he has flung open a closet door, and turns around to follow the person who knows where the nearest exit /actually is/.
Orrey, flustered: “This is what I mean, you can’t just jump out a window, what do you think is going to—”
Another crash.
Isa snaps her fingers. “Hey! Orrey. Lead them out. Cassiat. Get the kids safe. Bicker later.”
Orrey goes the hallway, waving for the others to follow him. Cassiat ushers the kids to Mama Alyon, who’s already moving out of the kitchen, and then sprints for the window.
Bast wastes no time in following Orrey, sparing only a quick glance for Cassiat.
With a guilty glance back at the kids and Orrey’s mom, Linnet grabs her satchel and follows Cassiat, reasoning she has an okay chance of not dying upon hitting the ground.
Yves runs after Orrey, because that’s what Isa said, right? And following her tactical advice has only gotten him sworded in the face once so far. Good odds.
Footsteps approaching.
Isa is prepared to hold the door until the room is empty, and not one second longer.
Cassiat is already moving as Linnet clambers out of the window, Orrey’s sister’s red hair vanishing down the fire escape as the younger girl climbs down as quickly as she can toward the alley below.
Orrey leads the way through a narrow hallway with peeling green wallpaper on either side into a room packed with sealed cardboard boxes, multiple lockers, trunks, and rolled-up rugs. An old spinning wheel, broken, sits in the center of the room. Two windows are on the opposite wall, pointing north, a radiator between them. There is another doorway heading east.
Lylja and Mama Alyon are gone, heading further into the rooms off of the kitchen, leaving Isa as the last person for that final second.
And Isa is gone down the hallway, keeping Orrey’s group in sight but hanging back far enough to keep an eye behind them.
Isa sees the axe approaching before the person wielding it.
A massive double-bladed axe, preceding a human woman with long black hair in a braid and a red scarf wrapped around her shoulders. Entirely too much wind is blowing along behind her, rattling picture frames on the walls.
Yves grabs the nearest trunk and shoves it in front of the door they’ve just come through. “Which way next?”
Isa closes the distance before the axe can get any momentum, grabbing for the haft to yank it away.
Bast gestures impatiently at the possible options, giving Orrey a look somewhere between angry and inquisitive.
Orrey looks flustered as anything, but takes a deep breath. “Window is where we all hang our laundry,” he says in a quick exhale. “I don’t know how much work they’ve done through the door!”
“So… door, less chance of accidentally hanging anyone by getting caught in ropes, right.” Yves gives the chest in front of the door a tiny kick to make sure it’s hefty. Yeah. Hefty enough.
“Right.” Bast shoves his way through the eastern doorway, eyes and ears straining to spot any new attackers.
Cassiat drops from the last of the ladder, eight feet and tucking into a crisp roll. She comes up in a run for the back of the alley, where a fence blocks passage, a dumpster pressed up against it for potential climbing. The mouth of the alley is open, but leads toward the entrance to Orrey’s building, and there’s still a commotion.
“Do we fight or run like hell?” Linnet follows close on Cassiat’s heels, a bit disheveled but otherwise all right.
Yves is right behind Bast, one hand held up with fingers curled just in case someone needs a bit of zapping to the face on the other side of that door.
“Airship dock! Galley!” is Cassiat’s breathless shout.
“…right, what am I saying. Up and at ’em!” Up the dumpster they go! (Cassiat’s comment means nothing to Linnet, who’s totally lost already.)
Isa pulls, and the combination of surprise, leverage, and nontrivial physical strength rewards her with a bright shiny new axe. She reverses her motion as soon as she has control of the weapon, slamming the butt-end into the other woman’s gut – attempting to knock the wind out of her so Isa can continue her retreat.
The eastern doorway leads to the open air, the brick exterior of the neighboring building almost bewildering behind what looked like just another bedroom door. Three stories up in the air, the two buildings are connected by a ten-foot-long, two-foot wide wooden plank bridge, no railings, with scaffolding hastily fastened to both walls, hammers hooked into exposed blocks. Half of the neighboring building’s walls are broken down, with a tightrope act across into a mid-renovation kitchen, or a damage-defying leap into a room with a wall-length mirror reflecting construction equipment.
The handle of the axe slams into her stomach, but her left hand comes around, guided by a force of will almost independent of the woman’s own instincts, choking up on the axe, pivoting and slamming Isa into the wall with enough force to shatter the glass on one of those frames. Her eyes are normally brown, but there’s a shimmering blue tint to the irises, a rage sparkling inside of them as they bore deep into Isa’s own eyes.
Bast tosses his toolbox across into the room with the mirror, glancing back the way they came to see what’s keeping Isa.
Cassiat lands on her feet on the far side of the fence, looking up to catch Linnet but then spotting that she’s got it, then runs around a corner, over a pair of crates, and into the closed back door of a shop. A vicious wind blows down the alley, sending chills up their spines, as Cassiat kicks at the door. A bent drain pipe leads upstairs to an open second-story window.
Yves is clearly trying to judge the leap to the mirror, because it’s better to know there’s nothing below your feet than to find out abruptly based on something snapping.
With a prayer, Orrey leaps, somehow clearing the cracked wall and landing in a textbook roll, though from how he comes up, he could stand to study this book a bit more.
Bast grabs Yves’ arm before he can fully wind up for the jump. “You still have any lightning left?”
“Yes, plenty.”
“Isa might need a hand.”
Yves whips around to look back the way they came from. “…maybe I shouldn’t have blocked the door.”
Isa snorts once, and brings a clenched and mailed fist in an uppercut into the woman’s jaw.
Cassiat bounces on the toes of her boots, anxious, as neither she nor Linnet can get the door open.
Linnet swears under her breath and rises to the second-story window.
Another wind whips through the narrow alley, almost ripping Linnet from the sky before she can gather herself. A very thin human male staggers around the edge, carrying a bit of sheared fence in his hand. He looks at the two of them with his dark, sunken eyes, and then starts walking toward them, bits of earth rising around every step he takes.
“Orrey! Check for exits!” Bast shouts.
“Got it!” he shouts back.
“Isa’s great at violence,” Yves says, in his most reasonable tone, “she’ll be fine. She told us to follow Orrey. Let’s go.”
Isa’s fist meets jaw with crunch felt deep in the pit of the stomach, and she takes advantage of the impact to push the other woman back far enough to interpose the axe haft between them.
“The hell? Cassiat? Look out!”
As Linnet struggles with getting a proper handhold on the windowsill, a massive chunk of earth erupts from underneath Cassiat, propelling her into the air with a shriek.
Orrey appears back at the wall. “There’s an exit! Street level, come on!”
Bast looks behind them once more, fingers flexing around a nonexistent weapon, and then takes two steps back and leaps.
The woman’s left arm snaps out again, grabbing Isa around the neck, and then throws her across the hallway — not hard enough to separate the fighter from the axe, but hard enough to crack a closed door, a thud made extra jarring by some level of barrier put up on the far side of the door Orrey & co. went through.
Yves, relieved to get the go-ahead, leaps right after Bast, to the best of his nerdy, semi-panicked ability. It turns out that reading books, despite all the page-turning, is not great for building many physical skills. Including the ability to do the unassisted long-jump on command. A startled squeak is left hovering in the space between the two points, like a puff of smoke, as the arc of Yves’s leap reaches its apex noticeably before the halfway point, and everything that comes after the apex does what the other side of an arc usually does.
Isa elbows herself off the wall, plants her feet, and brings the axe down in a double-handed arc aimed right for the woman’s left shoulder.
The scaffolding catches some of Yves’s fall, in that it finds his shoulder with pinpoint accuracy and attempts to relocate it somewhere slightly further south. A double knee into a support bar isn’t much better. The eventual landing is softer than expected, yellow feathers floating around a stunned Yves’s head.
“Cass! DAMN IT!” Linnet lets go of the window but remains in the air for a split second before trying to at least break her companion’s fall, if not guide it. There’s really not much of a plan, more of a desperate dive.
“…sharded bookworms.” Bast looks over the edge to see where Yves ended up.
A chocobo looks down at Yves, upside down. “Wark?”
Yves has landed in the STABLE.
Orrey grabs Bast’s shoulder. “We need to keep going! Wait, where’s Yves? Where’s Isa???” Orrey looks more than a bit terrified that all of this is happening so close to home.
Yves lies on the ground, staring up at the chocobo. “…you’re probably real,” he says faintly to the bird. “Unfortunately.”
Bast points down. “Yves.” Across. “Isa. Where’s that exit?”
“It’s down the hall here, a flight of stairs and then we can get to the street!”
“Right.” Bast grabs the toolbox and starts down the hall, looking for anything that might make a better weapon than his hammer.
Cassiat bounces. But she starts to pull herself back up, groaning. Gravel starts to rise around her, wobbling in mid-air as the pursuer stumbles forward.
Linnet attempts to shift her dive into a solid kick to the earth-wobbler’s head. Or torso. Or something.
Yves resigns himself to the fact that this is probably not over yet, and staggers up to his feet, looking much the worse for wear.
Isa’s opponent cracks her neck to the side, the sound loud enough to echo in the hallway. Then she approaches, cracking her knuckles, one by one.
As Bast heads for the stairs, he passes a great many things that can work as staffs or clubs, since he is passing through a dance studio.
Isa rolls her shoulders, and re-sets her grip on the axe.
Linnet manages to leave a dusty shoe print on the earth-bender’s face, but nothing more, screaming furiously all the while as she glances over her shoulder waiting for Cass to get up.
After quickly checking and discarding a couple, Bast grabs the sturdiest approximation of a staff that he can find.
Cassiat staggers up, holding her side. “Run!” she shouts. “I’ll hold him off!”
“With all respect, Cass, fuck that! Which way to the docks?”
Light flares around Cassiat, blue refractions playing on the walls.
“I am NOT telling Orrey I left his sister to get killed in an alley! …son of a sandstorm. Okay, you’re making your point.” Linnet floats back up to the second-story window, out of the way but with a clear line of sight to Cass.
White restorative light shines around Cassiat, and before Linnet can finish forming the word in her mouth, a spiraling blast of lightning ricochets down the alley, slamming the stalker in the shoulder and spinning him onto the ground.
In the hallway, across from Isa, the woman’s eyes flash full blue. She freezes.
She who hesitates is lost. Isa swings the axe.
Yves considers trying to get on a chocobo, but winces as soon as he starts hobbling that way. Fortunately, he has a recent example in mind of someone who deployed chocobos to great visual effect. Which is distracting, right? With a certain being who is /not/ on the list of Isa’s favorite people in mind, Yves starts undoing latches.
Linnet pokes her head into a room full of cellos and trumpets, a music store’s second floor. The far wall is a two-story-high glass storefront, with the nicest piano she’s ever seen front and center.
“Okay, that’s not all that useful.” Linnet ducks inside, aiming to run downstairs and open that stupid door that flummoxed them earlier. And the front door, hopefully to a bigger street.
Yves whispers to stable residents as he unfastens latches. “Go, little chocobos! Be free! Run through the streets! Have a good time! Be all, you know, uh, ‘wark, wark’, in a good way? Distractingly?”
The axe isn’t Isa’s weapon of choice. In fact, it’s probably down around five or six. Nevertheless, she knows exactly how to use it. And when the opportunity presents itself, she does. The axe comes back over her shoulder and then down, a twist moving from her hips up the muscles of her back and down her arms, gaining speed and momentum at the same time. It hits the other woman nearly horizontally, across the floating ribs of her right side, coming to rest just past her spine. Isa lets the weapon fall with the body, and turns to shoulder her way through the door Yves “barricaded” earlier.
The woman slumps down against the wall, the blue light fading from her eyes, followed by any other light. Her jaw goes slack, and a small, faded blue crystal tumbles out, rolling forward and coming to rest on the floor.
Bast opens a door at street level. For the second time in recent memory, a herd of chocobos goes sprinting by.
Bast, staying in the doorway, uses the distraction to check for anyone else on the street who looks like they’ll be a problem.
Inside the music shop, a very perplexed tonberry with spectacles and a tie with dancing musical notes on it gives Linnet a very perplexed look as she runs down the stairs. “Did you need to see an instrument, Miss…?”
Yves, for his part, is staggering away from the stable in the opposite direction to the one the chocobo herd took.
“Maybe next time! Sorry! Don’t go out your back door right now! Trouble in the street!” Linnet nearly knocks a tuba off its stand with her braid as she whips through the shop in a panic.
Bast can see one person that doesn’t belong — a viera with very dark fashion sense and a noticeable limp, heading to safety after freeing a horde of bewildered but overjoyed birds.
…of course, Yves is heading out the OTHER side of the alley now.
“Bast!” someone calls.
“Yves!” Bast calls after the limping viera, then looks around to see who’s calling him.
Yves spins awkwardly and wildly around to find out who’s calling him, clutching his dusty satchel to his chest like a not particularly robust shield.
A rope tumbles down on the top of the Alyon’s roof, landing in a heap next to him, stretching up to the roof. Bast’s eyes follow it up to Isa — looking like she just won a hell of a fight — but the voice that called out was male.
Bast’s eyes just barely sees someone vanish over the top of the roof — someone he hasn’t seen in quite some time, and someone who he has been looking for.
Isa leans out the window, looking up the length of the rope to the roof before looking down at Bast.
Linnet pushes open the door in the music shop just as Cassiat stumbles into it, looking completely exhausted. “Go go go!” she shouts, pushing Linnet back and slamming the door, just as the wind pushes it open again, ripping through the instruments in a cacophonous, discordant roar.
“…the hell…” Linnet groans and runs out the front door in search of a more competent adult.
“Son of a bitch.” Bast stares upwards for a moment, open-mouthed, then refocuses on their present situation. He calls after Yves again, stepping out into the street.
The sound of an entire orchestra completely blowing it is audible through the entire neighborhood, especially since a herd of chocobos seem to take that sound as a challenge.
Isa isn’t going to let a good rope go to waste, and uses it as a shortcut down to street level.
“You’re coming with me, young lady. And ideally minimizing the number of things you zap on the way,” Linnet says.
Yves limps towards Bast, wild-eyed and ruffled. And dusty. And…things other than dusty. “Who. Is after us. Where are we even /going/?”
As if in answer to Yves’s question, a train whistle blows, incredibly close, to the north.
“You – stick with Isa. Orrey – take this. I’ll catch up.” Bast shoves the toolbox at Orrey, drops his improvised staff and grabs the rope, making his way back up the wall as quickly as he can.
“Remember the meeting place,” Isa tells Bast, but doesn’t stop him.
“…right. The market is going to be chaos central if we show our faces in there. Let’s run for the train station and hope that might’ve been what she meant by ‘run.’” Linnet gives Cassiat a quick once-over. “I’m sorry I can’t heal you right now; I’m completely drained. But we’ll make it through this and then take our time to recharge.”
Bast crests the top of the Alyon’s roof just in time to see that figure drop out of sight two buildings over, toward the sound of that infernal racket a moment ago. It’s a rooftop chase from here for the moogle.
“And while we’re recharging might be the time for a lecture on using dangerous crystals you bought from random street vendors, but not before.” Floating isn’t quite as physically taxing as running, so Linnet still has breath enough to lecture.
A chocobo nearly bowls Linnet over, spinning Cassiat around, but then the two pick up their pace, a bronze hulk of an engine starting to lumber toward them on the tracks.
“…why are there chocobos in the street? And why do I suspect one of us had a hand in this?”
“I am going to kill that straw-headed…” Bast mutters under his breath as he sprints across the roof.
“Orrey, there was only one person sent after us down the hall, and she’s not a threat anymore. We need to get clear of here as quick as we can in case they’re watching the front. What’s the quickest way to a public area, a covered route if you know one,” Isa says.
Bast is always just the wrong number of steps behind, seeing the back of what has to be who he thinks it is heading into a blown-open doorway on ground level. It’s an easy jump across the alley, or a careful climb down a broken drainpipe.
Bast takes the jump, not breaking stride.
Orrey tries to keep calm. “The market, but we can’t bring anyone into the market if they’re hurting anyone! We could… that train going by is going to swing through the city on its way east. We could jump on and jump off!”
“…/jumping/?” Yves says, dubiously.
Cassiat staggers along after Linnet, drawing up to the train as it starts to pick up speed, flatbed cars carrying long pipes of an indeterminate metal on them.
“The train’s an obvious escape route. So we’re going to the market. Subtly,” Isa says.
Yves looks intensely relieved. “I can do subtle,” he says, perhaps optimistically.
“I don’t actually want to leave, I just want to be able to shake pursuit…” Speaking of which, Linnet turns to inspect the route behind them – and all visible paths to the train station – for said pursuit.
Bast reaches the edge of the roof. The street below is absolute chaos, birds wanting to fight tubas, people wanting to corral birds, and in the center, an almost emaciated male human, trying to push his way past the chaotic flock, in pursuit of a sylph and a human trying to get to the railline.
Isa nods to Yves, and claps him on the shoulder. “Lead on.”
Bast does not see the person he was most hoping to see, but Linnet and Cassiat trying to get away is a close second.
Yves nods a bit shakily, but he does look thoughtful. And then he /does/ lead, sort of sideways birdward, with a casual saunter that’s only a tiny bit limp-influenced.
Isa follows along, following Yves’s lead as best she can. Subtlety isn’t her strong point, but she isn’t the sort to draw attention to herself in the best of circumstances.
Linnet’s in a holding pattern at the entrance to the train station, anxiously scanning the crowd for her friends, her pursuers, or any vendors with suspicious crystals.
Cassiat is drooping fast, eyes going heavy-lidded, as if she spent a ton of energy that she did not have.
“Winds damn it.” Frantically, Linnet fishes in her bag and brings out a squashed cinnamon roll, shoving it into Cassiat’s hands. “Eat and stay with me, kiddo! If you go down here, I can’t save both our asses!”
“It’s like dealing with kids at school,” Yves says, in a completely normal voice, as he walks along and takes a turn as if this is a route he follows all the time. “You need to act as much as possible like you don’t care if anyone notices what you act like. Trying to avoid attention means you get more.” He adds, under his breath, “It’s easier to do at a distance.”
“Doing my best,” Cassiat slurs, trying to eat. “Orrey loves these,” she adds through a mouthful.
Bast looks around and sees a chimney a few steps away that seems to be barely holding together, age and elements having taken their toll. Excellent. He pries off two of the most intact-looking bricks and heaves them at the emaciated stranger.
Isa nods. “I am trusting that whoever this is, they’re not ready to escalate to wholesale attacks on civilians. They didn’t try to burn the tenement down; they came in personally. With more of those damn blue crystals.”
“I hope whatever that kid got her hands on isn’t one of them,” Yves says, still projecting an aura of calm that is not reaching very far down under the skin.
“It probably is. Sorry, Orrey.”
Orrey handles that news exactly as well as Isa expects.
“I probably would’ve bought one at that age too,” Yves admits. “…or three or four, if I’d found the money for it.”
“Sure. Cheap power is tempting.”
Linnet shakes Orrey’s sisters shoulders as the cheap power drains the young girl’s reserves. “Okay, Cass, focus. Which way from here to the airship docks? Assuming you can still run, that is.”
The figure staggers forward, then rotates his shoulders in distressing fashion and looks up at Bast, a deep breath filling his lungs, his hands twitching up.
“It’s like cheating on your chem exam because you’re bored and want to get into biochem already. Gets you to the right place faster, but… I don’t know. I don’t know how these work, exactly, or what they really do to people, but you can’t run on cheating forever.” Yves is still walking with a remarkable amount of false confidence. And taking the occasional shadowed patch of street that he passes through to brush more filth off his clothes, in an attempt to look slightly less like he literally fell into a stable.
Isa grunts. “Well, I’m two for two against them, so…”
Cass slumps against Linnet, a lot of weight in the belts and gear she has on. “It’s… south past the market, just… g’rounthewayyy…”
Linnet curses, dragging Cass up onto a bench. “Well, we’re not going anywhere with you in that shape. Staying put until your brother or his friends happen to run into view.”
Bast watches with no small satisfaction as the first brick hits the stranger in the back – mostly glancing off, but it gets his attention. He gives the figure below his widest smile and a friendly little wave as the second brick takes him right between the eyes.
The crack of the brick off the front of his skull is fantastic. Almost as satisfying is the sound of him hitting the ground, and not getting back up.
Another thirty minutes of skulking about reunites the party at the agreed-upon meeting place, not that dragging a severely-fatigued Cassiat along was simple.
By the time they arrive, the weirdness Linnet noticed with Cassiat has all but stopped — how her irises occasionally flashed to a brighter, more vibrant blue than her natural blue eyes.
“Saving…the lecture…until…she wakes…properly.” Linnet deposits Cass on an empty bench and slumps, panting. “Hellfire and hailstorms, people, what the blazes was that all about?” (Linnet weighs about seven stone soaking wet, and Cass is sturdily built and carrying an awful lot of gear.)
“I don’t know,” Yves says, in an implausible calm, “but I wanted a shower after the train ride, and I wanted one more after that explosion, and at this point I think I need a /bath/.”
“A bath, a meal, and an actual bed.”
The Windsong is a converted classic-style tavern, with room and board available alongside themed drinks like the Young Hero, Grizzled Veteran, and Grevious Bodily Harm. They sell novelty bundles of 50 feet of rope, something that Cassiat’s too sleepy to be embarrassed by.
Two Adventurer’s Quarters for the lot of you will run a total of 80 gil.
Bast, with the toolbox back in his possession and looking no worse for wear apart from some dust and sweat stains, seems to come back from wherever his thoughts had taken him and rejoins the conversation. “So. Any idea what the second round of assholes-on-a-stick was after?”
Yves is so ready for the bath that he has simply paid for one of the Adventurer’s Quarters immediately without any further discussion. Or, for that matter, reading up on what one of those /is/.
“Orrey, I swear I am going to box your sister’s ears when she’s sufficiently recovered to feel it. I don’t even know how to do that, but I will read a book on fighting, learn how to box someone’s ears, and then test it on your sister. But, despite all of our best efforts, she’s still alive and kicking.”
Isa drains her mug, and reaches for the pitcher to refill it. “Just grab on and shake,” she says, helpfully.
Orrey looks up from checking the window for the seventeenth time. “I don’t know who they were or what they wanted. If Lylja was here, maybe she’d—”
A knock comes at the door.
“Is that what ear-boxing is?” Yves asks, holding up a mug for the next fill. “I always thought it was some sort of fighting style.”
“Oh, is that all? I thought there’d be punching involved or something.” Linnet looks at Cass with the sort of annoyed fondness of an older sibling, then moves in front of her defensively at the sound.
Isa sighs heavily. “I can’t do this again,” she says, but gets up to answer the door anyway.
A female viera with glasses and a green-and-gray hoodie waves. “Good, you’re all here. Orrey, can I come in? Great, thanks.”
Isa plants a boot at the base of the door – enough space to talk through, but not enough to enter – until she gets the all-clear from Orrey.
Orrey sighs as she steps past Isa, or at least tries to. “This is Lylja. She’s… well, she can come in for now.”
Isa nods, withdraws boot, goes back to her drink.
Linnet does not relinquish the Mama Bear position in front of the snoring Cass; she’s armed herself with a hairbrush from her bag as about the only object she’s comfortable wielding in this state.
Lylja looks over at Cassiat with real concern on her face, and then sits down in one of the chairs like she was invited. “First of all – I’m going to assume you all know Orrey and know what’s up. That’s fine, I don’t care.” She resumes. “First of all, Orrey, your mother and everyone else is fine.”
Orrey lets out a huge sigh of relief and sags down into a chair by the window.
“Secondly, were you all traveling with Ingrid Augurelt?”
“The woman who was attacked at the station? She was on our train,” Isa says, guarded as ever.
“But not a friend? Sweetheart? Confidant?” Lylja asks, eyebrows dancing.
“Not of mine, anyway,” Isa says.
“We’ve barely been traveling long enough to be friends ourselves, lady. Get on with it.” The normally affable Linnet is very, very tired and very, very grumpy.
“I mean, there’s been enough shared trauma that it’s sort of like a university secret society at this point…” Yves considers.
“Charmers, Orrey.” She fiddles with a strand of her ponytail. “Anyway. So you all fought to defend her, or at least you acted like decent folk. The people after her were wanting to grab one of you, since they assumed you were all together, and a motley crew heading north of the tracks attracted a little attention. So far as I can tell, same folks, thinking you were all linked together.”
“Wait. One of us, like, here in this room? A specific one of us?” Linnet says.
“I don’t think so.” She gives Linnet an apologetic smile. “Just anyone linked to the Augurelt girl.”
Yves frowns over his drink. “I’m not sure if that’s better or worse than when people are out to get me personally.”
“Is she conscious? Can we visit her?” Linnet asks.
“So, if people are out to get us just for being on the same train with her, what’s so special about her?” Bast frowns in Lylja’s direction.
Lylja shrugs. “No idea. They’re sure as hell not letting any of us in.”
“Probably for the best,” Isa says diplomatically.
“Who’s ‘us,’ anyway?” Linnet chimes in.
“So her dad’s Sachsen Augurelt, which might mean something to Orrey… maybe? Yes? No? No. Okay, fine. Sachsen Augurelt runs Clear Skies, the largest shipping company here in Saron. He’s also really politically active, and has a lot of good things to say about the Avengers and is a real force for change in the city. Far as we’ve learned, someone’s trying to get her so they can make him change his tune.”
“Oh, that makes us the good guys,” Yves says in faint surprise.
“Who’s ‘us’, anyway?” Bast promptly replies to Yves.
Orrey looks ill at ease. “‘Us’ means the people keeping a hold of our leashes,” he says bitterly.
Lylja gives a what-can-you-do shrug.
“Us as in the people who stopped her from getting kidnapped,” Yves clarifies.
Bast merely gives Yves a rather unapologetic smile in response.
“Yeah, you folks did great,” Lylja says. “Fantastic job. Really going to go over well. I mean, I probably won’t even get yelled at because I came to warn your family, Orrey.”
Bast’s smile fades. “So. You know these people?”
Orrey takes a moment to process that. “You weren’t sent to keep us all safe?”
Lylja shakes her head. “Sent, no. And I know of the people behind this, but not much about them. Just that there were a few running around, and that they were looking for leverage. I think they’d been waiting for Augurelt for a while, but she was late coming back from her little pilgrimage thing. They got sloppy.”
“Oops,” Isa says blandly.
“And if you don’t want to be leverage,” she adds, “you probably want to get out of here pretty quick.”
“Well, we need at least a night to recharge, and enough time to get Cassiat back home and make sure she stays there. In a day or two, we’ll be prepared to be leverage with something a little stronger than a hairbrush.” Linnet has been smacking the hairbrush against her palm in lieu of anything else to smack with it.
“Seems to me-” Bast examines his nails “-that we did you and yours a favor here. Twice over.”
“I am /not/ leaving before my bath,” Yves mutters. “I can cast spells while naked, if it comes to that.”
“No demonstrating in front of the kid,” Linnet says.
Lylja rewards Bast with a brilliant and impressed smile. “A favor? Really?”
“You said it yourself, you probably won’t even get yelled at.” Isa adjusts her weight. “‘Fantastic job’, I believe the phrase was.”
“Two teams of whoever-these-are taken out. That much less muscle they can field against the Avengers, and notably no leverage on their side of the ledger so far,” Bast says.
The window of the room everyone’s gathered in smacks open, and a strong breeze ruffles everyone’s hair and ears. Linnet begins smacking the brush faster into her palm.
“Or would you have preferred them to have the Augurelt girl instead?” Bast follows up.
Lylja rests her chin on her hand. “You looking for a return yourself, or are you wanting to drop all this favor on Orrey’s ledger?”
“How much weight would it have, there?” Isa asks.
“I honestly do not know. I’m a messenger. I don’t balance the books.”
“I’m doing fine,” Bast says.
“Then I’ll be sure to pass that along. If I could do more, I would.” She stands up. “Anyway. Orrey, we need to talk business. Nothing new, no one has anything for you now, but I need to get word on how the auction went. Nice meeting you all!”
Isa lifts her mug by way of farewell salute.
Yves looks bedraggled and grouchy.
Bast only offers a corner of his mouth faintly crooked in a smirk as an acknowledgement.
“I have nothing to smack and I resent it.” Linnet drops the brush, sinks down to the floor, and rests her head on the bench where Cass is still slumped.
Yves waits for the woman to have gone before he says, “Even if she did bring a warning, I do not believe in her ethical standards.” “And I still need a bath.”
“Seconded. I’ve had to fight two people hopped up on crystals today and I am feeling grimy,” Isa says.
“We all do. Can we spare a day for R&R? I don’t think one night of sleep is gonna cut it for me or Cassiat,” Linnet says, fighting back a yawn.
Cassiat punctuates that thought by snoring.
Isa rolls a weary shoulder. “That, Linnet, depends on if anyone else tries to kill us tomorrow. But we can probably afford it.”
Bast looks over the variously damaged members of the party. “The way this day has gone, I think we might need to keep a watch tonight. I’ll be up for a while tonight anyway – you get yourselves sorted out.”
Yves stands abruptly. “I’m taking the first run at the bath in the room I’m in. If anyone attacks while I’m in the bath, shout, and I’ll zap.”
“I’m not even going to argue that too hard, Bast. Isa, bathroom’s all yours, I’ll see if I can’t do a bit more diagnostics on this idiot.” Linnet brushes Cass’s hair out of her eyes and smiles in spite of herself. “Anyone comes knocking, they’re getting a hairbrush to the face.”
And with that…
End session.