Penny

The Sunday Group - Seeds and Harvests

@Atalanta Im assuming we all head to Headquaters and group up before we strike out.

Cogs in the Wheel: WoT RP

Gulls squawked in raucous irritation as the squad of Defenders of the Stone tramped up the gang plank, ignoring the protestations of the Tarboner captain. With brusque efficiency half of the squad herded the small crew onto the forecastle and began to search them at sword point. The remaining soldiers disappeared below deck, doubtless to begin an equally thorough search.

Zoya Sakura watched, chagrined, from the porch of a wine shop. The captain of the Golden Pike was wringing his cap together in his hands and calling out curses and lamentations. He didn’t have what these soldiers were looking for but it was a rare captain indeed who could face the port authorities with a completely clean conscience. Hopefully it wouldn’t occur to him to disclose too much about the woman who had tried to book passage on his ship to Mayene. When the soldiers were done with their search, they tramped back ashore and the Golden Pike cast off. Two black clad soldiers remained aboard with the river pilot, when they reached Gordan at the mouth of the Erinin they would take ship back to the city, making it all but impossible for anyone to slip aboard one of the vessels. Only once the ship reached the outer harbor did the Defenders move on to the next vessel to be cleared. No ship had been allowed to leave the harbor without inspection for two days. No wagon or rider had been permitted to pass the gates without submitting to a similar search. The High Lords had given no reason for these measures, but rumors abounded, ranging from great treasures being stolen, to noble daughters attempting to elope with low born suitors. The most extreme versions of this tale even suggested the suitor was an Illianer.

The real reason for the High Lords’ agitation was more esoteric and much more damaging. Signs had been discovered of an intruder in the Stone. Initially assassins might have been suspected but once roused, Tariens could be damnabley efficient. They had discovered that a break in had occurred at the Great Holding, the vast fortified repository in which High Lords had, for hundreds of years, hoarded every item of Power they could find. Angreal and Ter’angreal in numbers that existed no where in the world save the Great Vault beneath the White Tower, all piled and collecting dust. Once the Holding had been indentified the Tariens had quickly realized that dozens of objects, described and recorded in dusty records ledgers were missing. Such an intrusion, so deep into the Stone and so close to Callandor was unthinkable and their determination to reverse it was bone deep and iron strong.

“Will there be anything more m’lady?” the wine shop attendant asked unctuously. Zoya sighed. She was no kind of a lady, but it was an easy mistake to make. She was short but full figured, giving the impression of a somewhat squashed hourglass, with dark brown hair and the olive skin of the Shadow Coast. Her accent was less definable, an amalgam of many lands that made most people shrug and speculate: Andor? Zoya’s most striking features were her eyes, they were large and spaced so as to give her a perpetually curious look, as if constantly fascinated by everything she beheld. This impression was not misleading and those who knew her quickly discovered that she just could not leave well enough alone. No onlooker could have guessed that for all her grace and beauty, she had been born in a hovel in an unnamed village, the daughter of a simple crabber.

That she was an Aes Sedai of the White Tower was a more likely guess, and a considerably bigger problem.

Not that Zoya exhibited the classic signs, the Great Serpent ring she won only a few years ago was hidden away in her rooms and she was too new to the sisterhood to have yet developed the ageless look for which they were famous. That was fortunate, for Aes Sedai were not welcome in Tear at the best of times, and this was far from the best of times. For all these precautions, a woman alone was suspicious in this land. Not for the first time she wished she had a warder who might pose as husband or servant, but she was a solitary woman, secretive and contained even in her own mind. To open herself up to another person was not something she had yet found the time for in her few years in the Shawl.

“No, thank you,” Zoya responded, producing a silver half crown and passing it to the man. Even at the somewhat inflated marketplace of Tear, it was twice what the drink was worth. The wine stood, barely touched, in the clay cup it had been served in. Zoya found the drink too sour. As a child she could not afford it, and since going to Tar Valon had found neither time nor inclination to develop a palette. Perhaps she should have forced herself to finish it for the sake of appearances but she could always plead a tender belly. The Light knew she felt a certain queasiness, she wasn’t getting out of Tear by ship, and that meant she needed a new plan.


@POOHEAD189

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The Sunday Group - Seeds and Harvests

We will stop by the Sunday Group building to speak to the medical examiner. Does everyone want to be in on that, or would you rather describe your own spaces/actions?

Space Dogs: Hired Guns in a Crumbling Empire

@POOHEAD189

The volume increased as the night cycle wore on. Mercenaries shared tales of dire adventures, boasted of places they had been, women they had known, and rich contracts they had completed. They compared hardware with equal enthusiasm with weaponry from half the arm, displayed, debated, and dissected as each man or woman tried to justify their own personal preference. The serving bots and serving women plied the company with alcohol and stimulants. This close to Brayden, tobacco was favored in the form of cigarettes or cigars but other drugs, kesh, synth-2, and kobal added to the flavor of narcotic haze. Despite the heady mix of drugs, alcohol, and firearms, there were no accidents. Accidentally firing a weapon was a good way to get yourself killed in a place like this and this crowd were the survivors of culture which quickly weeded out the careless or unlucky.

The music changed as a voluptuous lounge singer took the place of the original band. She began taking up the tune to a sultry synth-jazz number, much to the appreciation of the assembled mercenaries. As though timed to this momentary distraction, a woman slipped through the holographic camouflage and into the bar. Her face was concealed by a slim fitting full face visor that glowed with the soft green phosphor of an integrated HUD. She scanned the room, literally given the nest of sensors built into her expensive body armor, and settled on her target. Quietly, unobtrusively, she drifted across the room towards the lone merc at his table. She moved neither quickly, nor directly, seeming to move in and out of conversation naturally so as not to draw any attention to herself. Her path took her to the mercenary’s, Markus according to the various pheromone sniffers and aspect readers in her helmet, unguarded back. Here she lingered for long minutes, watching him drink, studying his body language, waiting for her moment. A minute after he started his third drink it was time. A neural impulse extended a tiny hypodermic needle from her glove. The tip, tiny by any standard, was invisible as a wisp of hair in the dim light. It contained enough neuroblock to put down a raging Cythonian bull. Grinning beneath her helmet she leaned back to strike.

The synth-jazz ballad cut off in mid stanza as the singer ceased her gyrations leaped from the stage, mic stand in hand. A collective gasp of disbelief went up from the crowd as the airborne singer, rotated the metal rod and extended it like a spear. She crashed down atop the visored woman knocking her sprawling with the full force of her body behind the microphone stand. The acoustics screeched with the force of the blow before the automated cut off kicked in, sounding for all the world like the cry of a striking hawk. The visored woman was knocked sprawling, the hypoderm snapping off against a table as she scrambled for purchase. With a digital snarl and a hiss of parting air she extended a las knife from her gauntlet and rounded on the unexpected attacker. The singer whipped the microphone stand around like a bo-staff, thrust one end at the visor in a feint, and then knocked the visored woman’s feet from under her, sending her clattering to the ground. With a keening cry the singer drove the mic stand into her opponents chest, once, twice, and then drove the butt of it into the visored woman’s face, bouncing her head against the floor with enough force to crack the plasteel. The woman slumped and went limp.

Jocasta Ap’Glynn pulled the microphone from the stand and lifted it to her lips. Her formerly blonde hair and red lipstick both began to flush a bright synthetic green. Excitement and sweat sheened her beautiful face as she blew a stray lock of hair out of the way and tugged her sheer sating gown back into place.

“and ever moooooooore,” she sang, completing the stanza she had interrupted when she leaped from the stage to intercept the assassin. The bar was silent for a long moment and then erupted in cheers and applause as the unconscious bounty hunter was dragged away by the bouncers.

The Sunday Group - Seeds and Harvests

I will be updating this in the next 24 hours. The next scene will be more action and less investigative.

The Sunday Group - Seeds and Harvests

@Naril do you want to add anything to the scene or shall I move us on?

The Enemy Beyond: Warhammer 40,000 Inquisitor RP

I all but ground my teeth in frustration. One of the problems with the kind of geas I had used was that the dominated tended to an over literal interpretation of order. I made a mental note to review the technique in the Malus Codicum when we were back at Agesalia, once void shielding and a lessening of Hadrian's curiosity allowed.

"Lead us to the Lieutenant, if anyone asks you have been assigned by the Inquisitor to guide us," I told him. Tears of gratitude brimmed in his eyes at the thought of being of use.

"Yes Mistress, this way," he gushed, springing to his feet and striding off down the hallway retracing out steps. As we re-entered the plaza we received more than our share of looks. The strange could be forgiven on a Rogue Trader, taken for granted even, but a party retracing its steps was more unusual. Fortunately, we headed down the passage before any comment could be made. I strode commandingly, with all the arrogance that life time of masquerading as Imperial Nobility had granted me. Hadrian was similarly gifted, though with a more martial gait. Clara could not help but effect the wary skulk of the professional soldier, but fortunately that relegated her to the entirely understandable category of Lifeward or hired muscle in the eyes of the on lookers.

We wove our way down a network of twisting ramps before emerging into what might have been a church at one point. A large statue of the Emperor stood at the far end flanked by flying buttresses. The statue had been altered, maybe sand blasted, so that its features were oddly indistinct and androgynous. Jagged Aldeari runs had been daubed on it in what I hoped was paint and a necklace of precious stones hung around its neck. The walls and floor were covered in what I first took to be an intricate sculpture of green glass, but on closer inspection proved to be a plant of some kind. It’s ivy like vines seemed to be climbing the buttresses and spreading tiny, perfectly symmetrical leaves of a disquieting green blue, with black veins running through them. It was an eerie combination of the beautiful and the sinister, the more so when the air recycle played over the leaves, rustling them just enough to reveal hook like thorns concealed beneath the greenery. Here and there small purple fruit shone opalescent, though they had a strange oblong cone shape to them which made them oddly repellant to my eye. I felt queasy at the sight and suddenly wished very much that we had brought Lucius with us. Better yet that Lucius had come instead of me. A hand caught my by the wrist and twisted my palm upwards.

"You stink of the warp," a strangely alien voice hissed. The Aldaeri warrior's grip was firm and its eyes were flat, red, and utterly alien. Followers of my career, with sufficient clearances, might be surprised to learn that this was my first encounter with the Aeldari. I knew nothing about them save for what all Imperial subjects do with a slight admixture of more esoteric tales of their decadence and debauchery.

"And you smell like a fire in a whore house," I snapped back, my aristocratic persona translating fear into anger. There was some truth to the insult, the alien had a disquieting scent, something like burnt cinnamon that cloyed at the back of the throat and tickled the sinuses. There was a gasp from the several humans that were emerging from an alcove behind the xenos. I jerked my hand free in the instant of shock and pointed my finger at the man in naval uniform that my thrall had identified as Naftor Sybdol.

"You, come with me," I snapped at the Lieutenant.

"Who are you?" he asked, bewildered and off balance by my deliberate insult to the deadly looking alien warrior.

"I am Heretoguidus," my thrall put in running the words together into a kind of name. The Lieutenant gazed at the peon in wonderment that an engineering-serf would dare speak in such company. I managed to cover my wince only with great effort.

"Something is wrong here," the Xenos hisses, "I do not know you."

"If you were meant to know who I was, the Master would have told you," I snapped. Something between a growl and a shriek was rising in the alien's throat. I had to get out of here and fast. I crooked my finger at Sybdol who took an uncertain step forward. Hadrian grabbed him by the front of the tunic and shoved him towards the door, deliberately forcing me to do the same while simultaneously interposing himself as a shield.

"Stop." the Aldeari commanded in a voice that could cut glass.

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