Post
Wed Aug 14, 2019 12:30 pm
#479
by Talvieno
Beta
The four squadmates decide to flip a plat chip to decide what they do, seeing as two of them want to go straight to the palaces, and the other two think they ought to visit Hosef'Wa first. Frank takes out a plat chip and designates one side as heads, and the other as tails. He flips it. It lands on heads.
Frank looks at the plat chip on the back of his glove for a long moment and sighs deeply. "Meeting the anti-human merchant it is, then. Not that I'll complain, having made the proposal..." He looks very much like he's regretting his decision.
Nilo isn't particularly pleased either, but he keeps his composure but for a sigh. "Nothing is as fair as chance."
"It's decided, then," Caleb says. "Let's get going - we should get this over with."
No one complains, so the four inmates retrace their steps to where they found Maki originally, and follow his directions to get to Hosef'Wa's shop.
But Frank is starting to get the distinct feeling that someone is following them at a distance - a strange, hooded figure that keeps to the shadows.
Along the way, they get a brief respite from the doom-and-gloom attitude they've adopted when they pass by a shop labeled "Kobi's Animals", that smells terribly like a barnyard. They finally figure out what "dralhenda" are - and it turns out their suspicions were correct. Dralhenda are the exact same creature as the "drakedogs" that Frank and Saoirse encountered back on Nanyej. These, however, are just babies. They're tiny and adorable - small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.
On noticing their interest, the shopkeeper, Kobi, hands one to Saoirse. She cradles the little guy in her hands as the fuzzy lizard licks her fingertips, and soon curls up in a little ball to sleep in her palm's warmth. Frank overcomes his fear of the creature enough to get a closer look, and even he has to admit they're adorable... although his previous experience at Huhoba Qitsit gives him a strong repulsion at the same time.
"So... these are the things you were so afraid of?" Caleb asks, touching the little guy with a fingertip. "Doesn't look too bad to me."
Frank only glares. Nilo, on the other hand, looks impatient.
The whole detour is actually going pretty well, though, until the shopkeeper mentions the price.
Saoirse's eyes widen. "How m-much??"
Chuckling, Kobi repeats himself; 4000 creds for the little pup. "They grow up quick," he reminds them. "Dralhenda always do. Good guard in just a month, nice sharp teeth. Good age to get - hasn't lost the fuzz yet. You sure you no want?"
But there's of course no way that Saoirse can afford the little guy. She herself only has 250 plat left. Even if Caleb and Frank pitched in, they'd be far from the 4000 mark. And so, with a sad sigh, the woman hands the little pup back, giving his neck one final stroke. The little lizard chirrups and nuzzles her hand, making the parting even harder. The shopkeeper strokes the pup himself and places him back into an open-topped crate at one side of the room.
The inmates soon leave, continuing towards Hosef'Wa's shop.
As they walk, Saoirse decides to break the silence, albeit hesitantly. "Now, then, em... I was thinking. As... our friend told us, the FMU are looking for us. And the guards in the comm shop were FMU, and the gang we’re headed to are allied to them, and so is Hosef'Wa. Maybe it’s possible they sent word of us to look around for us. Now, I don’t think they really got a good look at us in these suits as we were in quite a hurry to leg it, but we weren’t exactly being quiet about our names, and especially mine isn’t exactly one ye hear every day, to be sure. Maybe we’ve right to use code names from now on? Just to be safe.”
"Not a bad idea, Saoirse," Nilo agrees. "I shall go by 'Polaris' until we are in more secure areas."
Caleb ponders this. "Right. I'll be... Cole." It's the name of his old platoon sergeant. Caleb remembers fondly that the man had seemed like he'd walked straight out of a recruitment poster.
"I can be... Estelle?" Saoirse offers. "That doesn't sound too out there, right?" Nobody seems to think so.
"Are we really doing this? Oh well... give me a moment..." Frank sighs, thinking. Despite fully approving of the reason, he doesn't really have his heart in it. "So long as it doesn't have to be fancy, I'll go with Samuel for now."
And so Polaris, Cole, Estelle, and Samuel continue towards their objective.
~~~
Hosef'Wa's shop looks remarkably better than anything else they've encountered thus far in the markets. The walls are asteroid-stone bricks, edged with rusted metal trimmings. A few of the surrounding buildings have tried to copy this style, but Hosef's shop stands out among the rest as one that looks a lot wealthier, with a cut-metal name above the entrance. The front doors are solid metal and automatic, sliding on tracks into the walls. None of this, however, has saved it from being painted with various gang signs, just like virtually everything else in the area. It looks old and worn-down, but in comparison to the canvas-and-corrugated-steel of the rest of the marketplace... it looks fairly grand.
Of course, there is the minor detail of the sign beside the entrance that reads, in clear Standard, "HUMANS NOT TOLERATED." That might be a problem.
Nervously, the four inmates file in through the front door.
Their footsteps echo in the silent hall. Rows of weapons line the walls, both on shelves and attached to the walls themselves. There are hundreds of them, some plain and others painted in a variety of colors. Guns appear to be the most common, but there are melee weapons as well, and many weapons that the inmates don't even recognize. For instance, there's something that looks like a strange cross between a whip, a gun, and an angle brace, and another that resembles a bundle of grenades at the end of a nunchuck (even though that's clearly not what it is at all). There are a number of robots in here as well - mechanical spiders with clawed legs, a mechanical centipede bristling with gun barrels, and even a single humanoid model near the back. Almost all of it looks previously used.
As the inmates slowly advance, a voice rumbles from the shadows behind the shop counter, toward the back of the room: "Why are you here, humans?" This catches their attention; they whirl in the direction of the shopkeeper - a gorvan, no less - and step forwards towards him.
"We heard you were the go-to merchant when it's about weaponry..." Samuel begins hopefully. He's hoping that the person they're talking to is, in fact, Hosef'Wa. From what the inmates can tell, though, it's a typical gorvan: four strong, bulky legs on a quadrupedal lower body, two strong three-fingered arms, and an ugly, misshapen head that is vaguely reminiscent of a whale. They're herbivorous, and rarely thought of as violent creatures - or as being incredibly intelligent.
The gorvan doesn't say a word or even move.
The four squadmates glance at each other in apprehension.
"Kill them," a cold voice speaks. It's not the Gorvan, but a huge, heavy, four-armed alien that emerges from a double-wide archway behind the counter. He has a weapon in his hands - a large, nasty-looking gun of some kind.
Two well-armed wralk emerge from the shadows near the shop's entrance and bring their weapons to bear.
Nilo and Saoirse draw their weapons - a quantum lash and a kinetic battlestaff, respectively.
Gamma
Near-panicked, an adrenaline-fueled Teaw bends so she can move her hands behind her legs and starts viciously sawing away at the bonds holding her left shin.
In the meantime, Marina struggles to remember if the Nazas has any voice-activated commands. It does not. Instead, she decides to try to break free of her chair by force and pure willpower, using her limbs as levers against each other and the chair, and trusting in their armored durability.
Vrish watches these proceedings calmly, thoughtfully flipping a few more switches on the Nazas here and there. "You're wasting valuable time," he says with a sigh, making sure he keeps his tentacles well away from Teaw's thrashing on the floor. He removes a secondary nozzle from the machine and appends it to the first, deftly screwing it on and locking it into place. "I asked you a simple question, Teaw - if, indeed, that is your name. All I required was knowledge of your allies. And, for the future, do remember that I wasn't the one that chose to take things this far."
Teaw, quite honestly terrified at this point, manages to wrench her left leg away from most of the straps and immediately starts on the other side. As Vrish approaches, she bucks her chair violently in his direction, but he is able to sidestep it easily.
Marina, across the room, is straining against her bonds. It seems quite clear by this point that she simply does not possess the strength to break free - or anywhere near it.
Vrish, with a pleasant smile, lowers the nozzle towards Teaw's left shoulder. "Let's see," he says softly. "Will it be this time?"
He pulls the trigger. The Nazas clicks and whirs, in the manner of an engine that refuses to start.
The interrogator turns to Marina, as though she's his studio audience. "Ah well," he says with a humorous shrug. "One time out of five or so, I did say."
At that moment, Teaw manages to get her other leg free. Almost mad with panic at this point, she moves her shackled wrists swiftly beneath her legs so as to get her hands in front of her, springs from the floor, and throws her weight at Vrish, intending to knock him over...
...But she suddenly finds herself sprawled painfully on the ground with her hands beneath her, bleeding from gashes to her right arm, back, and face. It happened too fast for her to understand; all she saw was Vrish move out of the way. Marina, on the other hand, saw everything. Agile as a cat, Vrish had smoothly moved out of the way of Teaw's charge and bent to the side, flinging three of his heavy leg-tentacles as whips in her direction in the manner of a roundhouse kick. Where the gashes came from, she can only speculate, but peering closer, she notices what appear to bands of metal on the lowest portions of Vrish's tentacles.
Without a word, Vrish steps closer to his target and swiftly presses the nozzle against her right arm, pulling the trigger. The Nazas chugs and churns; Teaw screams in agony as an electrical sensation slices through her skin, shattering the bone.
"One of five," the hiltorel says pleasantly over his shoulder to Marina. "Better results this time than the last, I would say." Then, turning back to the collapsed Teaw, he continues in a relaxed, lighthearted tone, "Do you want to keep playing your little game? I could go for your legs next, you know. I could shatter your spine. I could gouge a chunk right out of your head." As an afterthought, he adds, "And that goes for you as well, of course... Marina." He returns to the Nazas and flips another couple of switches, and the machine quiets back down. "Now, with this messy business out of the way, shall we continue with our interrogation?"