Session 74 - Blowing In The Wind

Previously, Across the Horizon…
The south edge of Caerwyn, the edge of the known world (but not the Edge of the World), held the secret of communicating with Espers. Unfortunately, Yves discovered that the mask that remained of the previous Speaker, the child of an Esper and a person, wished nothing more than the absolute destruction of Yves and all of his friends.
The Esper half of the Speaker, Taijiya, engaged the group in combat, but found it had finally met its match. Isa in particular excelled against the shifting Slayer, drawing the Esper’s attention and then leaping clear of the focused attacks, obliterating the Esper in a crashing lightning bolt with Yves’s assist. The Slayer fell silent at the conclusion of the battle, and Yves took the half-mask back to the Starfall.
The last three days since the Taijiya mask retrieval have been full of activity, with Yves a blur of motion and bustle in preparing better living arrangements for the masks the party has retrieved since coming together outside of the Velvet Sundown. Fortunately, a ship of fools is the perfect place for this, as every bizarre request is filled, if not with ease, then at least with gusto, thanks to the assortment of builders and crafters currently calling the Starfall home.
We join our brave adventurers late morning one day as the Starfall idles outside of Machanon, waiting for the away team to return from a renowned farmers’ market…
**
Celeste looks between Orrey and Bast, back to Orrey, back to Bast, and stays on Bast. "You sent Isa out? With the actors?" A beat passes. "Without adult supervision?"
"I'm sure she'll be fine. What's the worst that could happen?" Orrey asks.
The Starfall is down seven people so far; an assortment of the crew, plus one officer to go down to the surface; Isaline Osler, the usual source of the actors' anxieties. She even volunteered.
Yves bursts into the area abruptly, looking a touch wild-eyed. "Did anyone put glacier water on the shopping list?"
"I'll check," Celeste says, her tone betraying a little fatigue with Yves's recent energy, not that Yves has ever been able to notice that at the best of times. "Jasper, do we--oh, hi, I didn't see you there," she says sheepishly as Jasper walks into the room, his eyes squeezed mostly shut to brace against Celeste's volume.
"We did not put glacier water on the list," Jasper says to Yves. "We did put mountain stream water on the list. Is this a matter of geologic necessity?"
Yves makes a complicated hand gesture. "I would say that water is water is water, plus or minus some mineral taste, but apparently there's something about it having gone through a state change where the previous state lasted for long enough and--you know what, I'll just tell them that mountain streams probably come from glaciers, and it'll have to be close enough until we stop somewhere with actual glaciers I can chisel from."
"Next time we're in Cardia." Bast makes an irritated sort of wave at all the noise and goes back to examining the weapon plans he drew up with Artemicion.
Yves whips out a notebook, and begins working out exactly how much glacier he has to chip off at some point in the future to create the requisite liquid for his cabin's new water feature.
"See, Yves, it's all in how you sell it. Whatever they pick up will be just fine. Unless Isa gets wind of your plans and decides to herd them off to an actual glacier before they come back with my vegetables..." Linnet, half-listening, is flipping through a cookbook for another recipe for a being that apparently does not eat.
"We're actually very close to the third-largest glacier on Ducorde," Celeste says brightly, not at all helping the captain as she attempts to help the captain. "It's at most a two day flight, though this time of year the winds are exceedingly dangerous, and a ship of this size could easily pitch to one side should it take a crosswind at a wrong time."
"...thank you for not bringing that information up before they left," Linnet says.
"Before," Jasper says, holding a hand up. "Before Yves vanishes back into the shadows and Celeste leads us all to where the river meets the sea, I have mail for you all."
"We should--" Yves hesitates, and says, in his best I remember that ethics exist, I should try using some voice, "Maybe if the mountain spring water doesn't work, we can visit that glacier at a safer time. Oo. Mail?"
He digs into a pocket on his utilikilt and pulls out a stack of letters. "I'll put Osler's in her cabin, but the rest of you are here. Conveniently, you all have one letter, which is quite nice. Your Arbiter friends forwarded this along, and it finally arrived this morning. Hopefully none of it's too late." Jasper hands the letters out.
Yves leaves off his glacier chisel machine construction sketch for long enough to accept his letter, one lop ear rising a little with the curiosity.
Bast looks as if he's suspicious of the entire concept as he takes his.
"Jasper, you're a gem." Linnet squints at the shaky handwriting on her envelope.
"I wonder what they have for us?" Orrey muses.
Bast raises an eyebrow as he reads his, then folds it up, puts it back in the envelope, and shoves the envelope into a pocket before returning to the weapon designs.
Linnet, on the other hand, takes an abrupt seat on the floor, staring at the piece of paper in her hand. The emotions on her face cycle through shock, confusion, dread, hope, and back to confused shock.
"Somebody wants me to create a portrait of the Azure Dragoon. How odd?" Orrey says, shrugging.
Jasper carefully lifts Linnet and puts her in a chair. "If anyone's threatening you, I'm going to throw Rahel at them," he says.
"No, nothing like that, although it might help to have her along anyway."
Yves looks pleased at his letter, and then concerned, and then very concerned, and then he realizes Linnet has collapsed and shoves his message away in the ubiquitous satchel to pay attention to more urgent matters right at hand.
Linnet folds her legs into a lotus position and then, in a move nobody here has ever seen, unclasps both of her ankle bracelets. They're almost as much a part of Linnet as her hair, simple, slightly gaudy three-strand metal pieces, braided of a strand of silver, one of rose gold, and one of bronze. Each has a few sparkly bits set into them, the focus being two identical rough-cut crystals. (Or at least, they look identical, mainly to confuse would-be pickpockets.)
"Linnet?" Orrey asks.
Bast looks up at what's going on, apparently resigned to making no progress on the designs just now.
"Uh?" says Yves.
Linnet stares at the two pieces of cheap jewelry in her hand like she's seeing them for the first time.
Celeste and Jasper both look like they have some understanding of what she's looking at, though neither of them seem clear as to why she's looking at it.
One crystal is a vibrant emerald-green; the other matched it at one point, but the color has almost bled out of it.
"Serj, what the hell are you talking about?" Then she realizes everyone's staring and looks up in a hurry. "Whoops, sorry. I can explain." With a hitching half-laugh-half-sob, Linnet holds up her anklets. "These were handed down from my grandmother. I don't remember her, she passed when I was two, but I'm at least the third generation to wear this jewelry. I'm the first, however, to rework it to hold my crystal."
Yves, who has often been the one in the position of making dramatically cryptic statements, makes a little take your time gesture.
"These matched, up until fairly recently. I just about never take these off, because I don't need to, but I had to check and make sure it wasn't that simple. That something hadn't gone catastrophically, simply wrong and I just hadn't noticed because I'm such an airhead." To another wind sylph, in that tone, this would be a considerable insult.
Celeste flinches at Linnet's term for herself, to drive that point home.
"Serj Tarkan from the Viesen-Croyle factory writes me to say he'd like to return my crystal. I was afraid he was right and that I'd just knocked it out of the setting, and hadn't noticed, for that damn long. But no. It's still here, even if it looks terrible." Linnet lays her jewelry on the table and makes a small gesture to invite further observation, if anyone wishes. "So what in the name of gale-force winds did he find?"
"...something like... what we found on some of the couerls, maybe," Yves says, deeply unhappy at the very thought of it. "Not unlike the cannon makes. But maybe... not from. One of them. Maybe."
Already somewhat pale, Linnet goes ghost-white with a sudden thought. "Or he found the other wind sylph's crystal."
"Anything about how he found it?" Bast asks.
"Nothing. He offers to return it either in person or by mail, but I don't think I trust this to the post...nor do I wish to wait that long." Linnet looks up at Jasper. "Serj was flirting pretty heavily with me before we went in, hence my thought of bringing Rahel along to throw at him as a distraction."
"She can be very distracting," Jasper agrees.
"Captain?" She takes a deep breath and straightens her spine. "May I put in a formal request to return to the scene of the Viesen-Croyle incident?"
Orrey frowns as he remembers what went down last time. "We'll back you up, whatever you need, there," he says.
"...the scene, or just close enough that he can hand over a crystal?" Yves asks, folding his arms into what's not quite a self-hug but is trending that direction.
"Yves, just how much trouble would AZYS be able to throw our way, back there?" Bast asks.
"I mean, he's offered to meet for coffee, so I figure he's not intending to do so right inside the wrecked factory. But I'm not leaving out the possibility of having to retread that ground," Linnet says.
"...and where do we find a good lawyer on short notice..." Bast adds in an undertone.
"Alternately, I could just take the Meteor and a competent pilot, if returning to the scene would be a wider concern."
"Oh of course we would come with you," Yves says hastily. "...I do know some lawyers, but mostly, like, for criminal defense things, not anything major."
"Jasper - how much ammunition has the cannon produced so far?" Bast asks.
"Let's see." Jasper pulls out a clipboard. "By my estimate, we could take out maybe three ships, so long as they attacked single-file and only came at us from one side," Jasper says after a moment. "That's not exactly a shell count, but it's a rough estimate based on our current combat capabilities and Owen's strained back."
"We need four or five more of him," Linnet muses, rubbing her thumb over her discolored crystal. It's less the color of a yellowish emerald now than that of slightly oversteeped green tea. 
"Alright, so enough to add some weight to our regular cannons. I'm thinking we take the ship most of the way, then have a nice quiet visit into town on the Meteor."
"...wait, was that a yes? I mean, you can still just drop me, or possibly me and Rahel..."
"That place was horrible," Yves says, "of course we're going with you. I mean. You know what I mean. You probably know what I mean better than I know what I mean, but I think I know what I mean, and you know too."
"With a company that does that kind of contracts and probably controls half the town out for our blood? Not sending you out without backup," Bast says.
"If the Captain wasn't going to help you, Linnet, we would have thrown him overboard," Jasper says with a smile and not an ounce of exaggeration.
Linnet's eyes are shimmering a bit, but she manages to smile at everyone around her without quite starting to cry. "...thank you." She gropes for her jewelry on the table and clasps it back around her ankles. "I mean, for all we know, this could be just a chip off someone's equipment. But...now I have entirely too many other possibilities to consider. ...and Triscuit definitely stays on the ship for this one."
"Triscuit stays well away," Yves agrees fervently. "Entirely different ship, under an assumed name, pretending to be a slightly odd dog, as necessary."
It has been weeks since the adventurers left Kuganepo, and they left on a ship in a hurry with a cargo hold of captured couerls and a trail of wreckage behind them.
Isa brings the Meteor in for an easy landing, leaving the Starfall patrolling in the distance. Rahel and Shula have both joined Linnet on the away team for moral support, and somewhere in the sky Jasper is walking around with a couerl kitten perched on his shoulder trying to eat his beard.
Linnet knows how to contact Serj -- he signed his letter with his post and position, in case she didn't remember who he was, even though he clearly remembered who she was, how could he ever have forgotten that moment -- and the city is at their disposal otherwise.
There is a light rain falling.
Linnet has donned a hoodie for a bit more of a disguise, but it's kind of hard to fully disguise a waist-length braid. At least she's walking steadier than she was when she left. "Right, I'm not getting any less anxious standing here. Shall we?"
Bast is definitely not wearing the hat the others talked him into wearing to the previous AZYS meeting. "Let's."
Shula has an umbrella that she holds over both her and Linnet. Rahel, free spirit, is content to walk in the rain (plus she hates her hair today so it's not like it could get any worse). ("Smokescreen around weird guys" is a play all three of the girls have run many, many times.)
Yves has also dug out one of his hoodies, rather than his adventuring coat, for this excursion. Any disguise potential of the hood is rather negated by the silver decorations at the cuffs and back. "...um. Yeah. Let's."
Orrey pulls up the hood on his rainjacket, doublechecking his satchel to be sure its waterproofing is holding up.
Thirty minutes later, Linnet and entourage have been shown into the Factory Workers #3101 building, and Serj Tarkan, who has combed his fire-red mohawk and does look well put together, steps out of his office to greet them. "Miss Leveche, it is wonderful to see you again. And your many friends as well," he adds.
"Serj, thank you so much for your letter. I realize it's been a bit, but, um, we left in a bit of a hurry last time. I'm sure you understand." Linnet's awkward expression is completely unfeigned, for once. The party takes up two tables in the building's small cafeteria.
Yves, one of the many friends, looks about ready to bolt for an exit, or possibly just freeze up in the next bright light he encounters.
"Right, there's a few here you haven't met. Shula and Rahel are old friends revisiting their college stomping grounds." Linnet squeezes her girlfriends' hands under the table.
"Of course," Serj says. "Trust me, none of us here thought any less of any of you for it. It was a very difficult time."
"Hi," Shula says evenly. Rahel tilts her head forty-five degrees to the left and smiles with her whole face.
"So how's the cleanup process going?" ("Find any more bodies, or mutilated abominations, or ghosts?" she doesn't say out loud.)
"Almost complete," Serj says. "It has been a focal point for us here at the union, to make sure everyone returns to a safe and secure workplace. Specialists have been brought in to go over the full buildings, and there have been... inquiries made about the basement," he says, uncomfortable at even alluding to the experiments.
"I can imagine. How's employee retention been?"
"We're renegotiating with AZYS," he says flatly. "The contract was definitely voided."
"Well, I wish you the best on that front," Linnet replies, in a heavily loaded voice. She's having a hard time mustering the flirty persuasion of their first meeting. "So, I don't mean to be impatient, but...may I see what you found?"
"Of course. I have it in my office. Do you mind waiting here while I go get it?" Serj asks. He also is having difficulty flirting, though the other six people here could be contributing. Then again, it could just be him.
"Of course not, please, take your time. I could go for some tea, actually." Linnet manages a smile and glances up at the menu board.
"You didn't bring it with you?" Orrey asks, skeptically.
"I don't carry it with me around clients or on the job," he says, perhaps too defensively, to Orrey. "I don't want anything to happen to it." Serj takes Linnet's tea order, and after a moment asks the others for anything they want. Once those are decided upon, he heads back toward his office, dropping the orders off at the cafeteria counter.
"Thank you for putting him off his game. Good grief that was painful last time." Linnet sags slightly. "Orrey, would you carry around a stranger's job crystal?"
"To the meeting with the person where you're going to give it back to them? Yeah." Orrey says.
Yves says nothing, but is attempting to map out multiple exits from where he's currently sitting, and not doing a very good job of it.
"I'm going to walk around a bit and see if there's anything weird going on." Orrey says. "If that's ok with you, Captain."
"Chill, gloombunny. You look like you're expecting a wild animal attack any second, and that's not going to dissuade anyone who might be looking at you. Have some tea."
Bast gives Orrey a curt nod. "Yell if it finds you."
Yves twitches. "You never know what might be in the tea," he says grimly.
"...have a scone, then. Scones are about the least suspicious thing out there."
Orrey wanders around a bit, looking for suspicious activity, probably too obviously.
Linnet drops her voice. "Look, if he comes back with reinforcements, there's enough of us to drop him; this room's really not big enough for a full-on fight. If he comes back with a rock, then I have to figure out what to do with it. That's all."
Yves decides to accept this line of argument. And a scone. But not the tea. The tea is still suspect.
Bast, similarly quiet, replies "And if the building's surrounded, I have a trick or two. Just in case."
The door opens, and Serj returns with a small wooden box held carefully in both hands. The door behind him sticks open, in case any would-be detectives have trouble they need to go find. Serj sets the box down, then gives Linnet her tea, and with help, everyone else's orders.
"Thank you. So, where did you dig this up?"
"We found it in the central room, where the experiments were run." Where Linnet was struck by the Malison.
Linnet accepts the box and opens the lid.
Inside the box is a yellow-green crystal, resting in a hand-stitched felt interior. It looks somewhat like your job crystal, but not quite.
Meanwhile, Orrey falls through a door.
Yves bites clear through his scone.
The office lay somewhere beyond the open door, and a brief excursion would surely cause no one any harm. Suspicious activity needed to be investigated. Unfortunately, the first door Orrey leaned against to listen through was unlocked, yet still alarmed.
"That's not what was supposed to happen..." Orrey says helplessly.
Linnet breaks off staring contemplatively at the box and looks up at Orrey. "Oh for heaven's sake. Serj, thank you, I've been rather out of sorts without this. Um, is Orrey all right?" Quietly, she closes the lid and slips the box into a pants pocket.
Bast rubs his eyes, muttering "Can't take that boy anywhere..." loud enough to hear around the table.
Yves chews a very full mouth of scone aggressively.
"What was supposed to happen?" comes a woman's voice from behind Orrey, followed by the sound of a thick club slapping into an open palm. A warning bit of punctuation.
"Uh...well, I don't know really, but definitely not this." Orrey tries a smile.
"Did he damage something over there?" Bast tries to get a look at the new...face on the scene. "We'll cover it."
The woman behind him is a good seven inches taller than Orrey, with short spiky blonde hair, a multitude of piercings in her left ear, and black lipstick. Black jacket, black jeans, black boots, black gloves. "You don't know," she says, fitting the words around the constant smacking of gum. A studded black club rests in her hands. "Just wandering around back here setting off alarms for some fun little bullshit?"
"I wouldn't call it fun, no. Sorry about the alarm." Orrey says.
Linnet looks at Serj in a bit of a panic. "Someone you know?"
Yves attempts to convey, through pointed scone-eating, that he's not with... anyone here, somehow, simultaneously.
"Ripley, it's fine," Serj says. "They're the ones who helped us with AZYS." He looks like he wants to sink into the floor.
Ripley methodically moves the tip of her club through the air, slowly yet inexorably, to rest against Orrey's chest, and pushes him back toward the table, away from the door.
"Serj, honey, maybe you'd better get back to work and wash your hands of us. Thank you." Linnet hugs him briefly but fiercely. "I think it might be time we collect our friend and make tracks, though."
Orrey holds his hands up. "Interesting that you have such alarms set up. What are they for?"
"Hah," Ripley says, smirking like she's cornered a rabbit between two tall fences. "They're for you. Specifically you. They worked great."
Orrey can't help but smile. "They sure did."
Yves leans over and whispers to Bast, "If only she were working for us." Then goes back to pretending he has no idea who any of these people are.
"Tarkan, if we're going to make inspection, you need to finish up your lunch date," she says, not breaking eye contact with Orrey while addressing her supervisor. "See ya, kid."
Bast can't help smiling at Yves' remark. "Isa would have...words. Orrey? Stop making friends. We're heading out." "She seemed so nice and so competent." Orrey walks out with everyone. "What do we do with the crystal now?" Orrey asks.
"And we don't want to wait for someone less nice to come asking about the alarms. As for the crystal..." He looks over at Linnet.
"Drop me a line when you work out your final contract, yeah? And again, thank you so much for reaching out. This will be a huge quality-of-life improvement. C'mon, Rahel, let's get everyone back to the ship before they break anything." With an enthusiastic if slightly unstable smile, Linnet squeezes Serj's hand and the girls depart the cafeteria.
Once outside, Linnet walks rapidly away from all sight of the building, not really paying attention to where she's going.
"I don't know, Bast. There's so much I don't know about crystals, but my working theory is that this was Cirri Idraen's. Except it looks intact and she wasn't and I don't know what happens to a crystal when a sylph dies."
"Is she? Dead?"
"Damn it, if only my parents had been a little more inclined to the usual 'facts of life' talks and a little less buried in their ancient manuscripts." Linnet glares at Bast, but keeps walking. "Didn't we see her ghost, and her scarf, and the stain on the wall? You think she could have survived that?"
"Just thinking about that wind. It went after us with intent."
"Ghost. Wouldn't that imply that some part of her is still here? Maybe tied to something here?" Orrey asks.
"...I'm not going to ask that we go in there and investigate, but I can't just leave this be. Whose crystal am I holding, and why does it still look fully intact, and and and and." Linnet clenches a hand over the lump in her pocket. "...and we probably shouldn't be having this conversation in the middle of the street within earshot of her coworkers."
"We should go back in?" Orrey asks.
"Anyone got shopping to do before we head back to the Meteor?" Bast asks.
"No, they don't carry glacier water in any of the stores near here," Yves says bleakly.
"They'll be fine with the spring water, at least for now. Let's go back so I can scream at the walls in private."
Back aboard the Meteor...
The launch heads back for the Starfall, at least for now, leaving Linnet and friends with many new questions and one new crystal in a box.
One new mostly-as-yet-unexamined crystal in a box.
Linnet removes the crystal from its lining and stares at it, haunted. "...other than those weird crystals Cassie bought off the street, I've never seen a crystal so completely detached from its, well, its person. ...Shula, do they always fade when a sylph dies?"
"I wonder if..." Yves falls silent again, not willing to complete that sentence yet, at least in this company.
"Over time," Shula confirms. "But usually, you return it to its element. Water is sent out to sea, lightning is set out in a storm, air given back to the winds. Funeral arrangements." She doesn't sound entirely comfortable talking about it. "I don't know what happens if you can't do that. Doesn't really get talked about."
"That part I remember, but my books never really covered what it looks like in that case." Linnet sighs. "Folk tales, all dramatic pre-death monologues and nothing on the details."
Orrey pauses, thinking. "I could ask the Gods a question for you."
"...can you ask them whose this was? Do I have any other way to figure that out?"
There is a particular smell to this crystal, now that it is out of the cafeteria and is just here in one of the many storage rooms that sprang up on the Starfall.
It smells faintly of cinnamon.
"I can ask a question with a yes or no answer." Orrey says.
"Jidoor might have some more general answers about the crystals, maybe?" Bast offers.
"I mean, I figured I'd start by asking the sylphs around me." Linnet shrugs, taking a deep breath - and then stops mid-breath, looking very alarmed. "...why does this smell like my healing spells?" Linnet passes the crystal to Shula. "Double-check me on that?"
"...cinnamon scones in the cafeteria?" Yves suggests, not looking particularly convinced by that suggestion himself.
Shula smells the crystal, raising her eyebrows as she does so. "Cinnamon. Like your baking, really."
"Linnet, could that somehow be your crystal?" Orrey asks.
"...okay, now I'm freaked out. ...Orrey, how in the heavens would I have lost my crystal and acquired another without noticing?"
"Can a crystal's link be...swapped, somehow?" Bast asks.
"I have absolutely no idea." Linnet is still gripping the crystal hard enough that her knuckles are white, but it's less possessive and more fearful of it vanishing somehow. "...I think I need more information. I could convene a larger meeting if you'd like, or I could just sit down with Ryna."
Orrey mumbles to himself as he thinks somewhat out loud, "Thalatte, Goddess of the Winds? And of potential? No other symbol of potential than a crystal that allows you to unlock your abilities..."
A light breeze drifts through the room, rustling Orrey's papers and smoothing Bast's fur. Linnet's braid twitches for a moment, moving of its own accord for the first time in forever.
Linnet shuts her eyes tight and clutches the crystal close to her heart. "...meet you all in the galley in two hours? I think I need a bit. Shula, please ask Jasper and Rahel to come if they'd like, and Orrey, maybe ask Celeste if she can be spared? We're going to need all the minds we can bring together for this one. ...I almost don't dare hope."
Orrey nods and heads off to find Celeste.
Shula remains sitting for a moment as the others file out, Linnet last, sparing another squeeze of her friend's hand before the Starfall's builder is left alone with her thoughts. Another breeze blows through in Linnet's wake, the smell of cinnamon on the wind, a melody dancing in the stale airship air.
Shula nods along, mouthing the words to the song on the wind, before standing up and turning the light off behind her.
End session 74.