OOM: Vivec, 24 Last Seed, 3E 427

[moonandstar]

They had, of course, been glad to hear about how he'd handled Tongue-Toad. His fellow guildmates had sent word of his accomplishment ahead of the storm. Now, as luck would have it, they had a new assignment for him - this one a bounty put up by the Ordinators for a Khajiit outlaw who was "somewhere here in Vivec - St. Olms, I think."

Naturally, Garyn sets out for the first location Lorbulg had mentioned - the head office of the Ordinators. This, a passing guard had curtly told him, was in the Hall of Justice at the High Fane - the two slim spires at the end of the central canal, beneath the giant floating rock they called the Ministry of Truth.

The mer to talk to is a severe-looking fellow by the name of Elam Andas. Garyn judges him as reasonable, but about as cheerful as Ald'ruhn is wet. Turns out even the lead of St. Olms is more than the Ordinators know. Curious, that.

In any case, their efforts were now divided with the rash of mysterious killings that had been sweeping through the city. Yesterday two guards had stumbled upon the killer in the act and had their throats slit before they could draw their weapons. Any information he could provide about that would be rather more helpful.

This, of course, is more than Garyn knows. Andas nods, and gives Garyn his leave.

"An outlander like you ought to be careful," he says. "The killer seems to have it out for foreigners."

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Garyn isn't usually surprised when speaking Ta'agra pays off, but he wasn't expecting it to pay off in St. Olms Canton in Vivec City. A few words with some Khajiit by the canalworks narrowed down his search considerably. The crook was hiding in comfort - an apartment built into the canton itself, rather than the stilted shacks that lined most of the canals.

A quiet knock on the door. Then a louder one. Then, in flawless Senchal Ta'agra, Garyn speaks.

"Dro'Sakhar! We have to move!"

The door cracks open. It's all he needs.

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Garyn wipes his sword as the Ordinator inspects the corpse. What little conversation the bandit had made before he attacked had confirmed that this was the Khajiit Garyn was looking for, as did his personal effects.

He'd searched a little more thoroughly than the Ordinator had. But he could find nothing tying him to the guild, or to any organization of any kind. As far as he can tell, this is a legitimate bounty on an independent outlaw.

"I'll inform the Order of the Watch," the Ordinator says. "They will send the bounty along to your guild. Collect your reward from your guildmaster."

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He'd had to wait a couple days for more work. Lorbumol hadn't been expecting him to return so quickly. He seemed almost as annoyed as he was pleased.

Garyn almost wishes he were still waiting. Now he's at the Rat in the Pot in Ald'ruhn again, this time on a debt collection job. He's always hated shakedowns. The marks either don't want to be found or have some pathetic story or another. Sometimes both. And often times - far more often than he'd like - the sad story turns out to be true.

This one's name is Lirielle Stoine. She's easy enough to find - a skinny Breton with short, red hair, keeping to herself at a corner stool. She doesn't deny it either.

"My brother Ruran is dead," she says quietly, her eyes not leaving Garyn's. "I'm sure of it. The Camonna Tong said that he owed them money, which I don't dispute."

She breathes deeply and her eyes narrow. "But now they say that I owe my brothers debts. I don't have 2000 drakes. I've never had that much money. I can't well pay what I don't have, can I?"

Garyn grimaces. "No, I expect not. But I can't go back to the guild empty-handed either. Your brother -"

"Is dead. A dead fool who has already paid for his foolishness. He knew he was in debt, and he went off to some place called Mallapi northeast of Gnaar Mok to 'seek his fortune,' or so he said. I haven't heard from him since, but the Tong know what happened to him. And they don't need to say it."

Garyn pauses. The gears begin to turn in his head.

"...I don't suppose you'd know where I might find this 'Mallapi'?"

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It's two days' and one night's journey through the swamp to the rough collection of boards and fisherman's shanties that the locals call Gnaar Mok. Lucky for him they seem to understand his discreet line of questioning. No doubt this Mallapi is important enough that even the fishermer can grasp what it's used for.

It's a cave, of course. He'd been told the Bitter Coast was full of them. Garyn would bet everything he owns (admittedly not much at the moment) that this Mallapi is a storehouse for Camonna Tong smuggling operations. It explains how the Tong knew that Lirielle's brother was dead, and how he might have been desperate and stupid enough to try to make his fortune by robbing it.

The locals' directions are vague - most have been steering clear of it, no doubt - but Garyn's tracking skills make it easy to spot. A half-trodden path of grass leading from a small cove to a moss-covered cave entrance. Used fairly regularly, from the look of it. He'd guess probably between six and a dozen men guarding it.

He approaches carefully with his sword drawn...

Comments

[moonandstar]

There's a large, crude door built into the front of the cavern, half-hidden behind a mat of moss and foliage. The entry gives it a great deal of room to open and close - obviously this door is meant to be held open or shut for long periods of time.

Garyn swipes the moss aside, grabs the handle, and looks back at Ibani. Hopefully, she'll be able to sense what waits behind this door.

[last_kallig]

Ibani moves through after him, then raises a hand in a 'just a moment' gesture as she reaches out with the Force toward whoever or whatever might be beyond the door.

[moonandstar]

She should sense a dozen Camonna Tong goons inside - the high end of what Garyn had estimated. All of them Dunmer like Garyn, two of them emanating a power not entirely dissimilar to her own that she may nonetheless find hard to identify. There's a sound trap at the front entrance, designed to rattle each time the door is opened.

[last_kallig]

"Twelve Dunmer, two of whom feel almost like force sensitives, but not quite. I'd guess they're mages of some kind," Ibani explains.

"There's a trap that's meant to rattle whenever the door opens. I should be able to keep that from rattling with the Force, though I'm not sure if those mages would pick up on that."

[moonandstar]

"I doubt a hedge wizard guarding a smuggler storehouse would know how," Garyn says.

"I'll be moving in quietly on three."

He leans against the door.

"One...two...three."

[last_kallig]

"You'd know more than I about what mages are capable of," Ibani replies, smiling.

She reaches out with the Force, stilling mechanisms, and when three comes the trap fails to make so much as the tiniest rattle. If Ibani wanted to, she could thread a needle with the Force, the mechanism in question is far bulkier than that!

Ibani wraps herself and Garyn with a force cloak. "They shouldn't sense us unless we bump into them or attack," she explains. "I've gotten very good at this technique, so we should be able to take down a single ruffian without any fuss."

[moonandstar]

Garyn holds up a finger and continues. He suspects the cloak suppresses sound as well, but he doesn't feel right continuing to talk while there's still work to be done.

He slowly descends through the cave and rounds the corner to the main chamber. There's a helmeted Dunmer in steel armor standing sentry on a jutting rock near the front of the room as the sounds of a boisterous game of cards echo through the cavern.

Garyn sizes up his opportunities. He can take down a man in armor, of course. Taking him down quickly and silently is another matter. He nods at Ibani, then at the armored man, making a gesture of pinched fingers.

[last_kallig]

The cloak hides them from all the senses, but Ibani can understand him not wanting to talk. Besides, it's easier to maintain it if he doesn't!

The force cloak collapses when she wraps the Force around the neck of the helmeted Dunmer, but by then he can't get enough air in his lungs to make any noise so it doesn't really matter.

While the Dunmer is en route to unconsciousness due to lack of air, she tilts her head inquiringly. Leave this one alive?

[moonandstar]

Garyn walks behind the armored thug as he slides into unconsciousness, guiding him gently to the ground. Quietly he removes his helmet, and slides a gauntlet off his right hand.

Then, focusing intensely on the mer's bare hand, he draws a dagger from his belt and plunges it through his palm into the ground. They may need him alive, but they'll need him dead soon enough, and they can't have him getting away to tell his friends in the Tong.

[last_kallig]

Ibani makes a mental note to fiddle with methods of rendering someone unconscious for a while the next time an opportunity presents itself. She'd fiddle with this one, but the biological mechanisms can be delicate and vary quite a bit between species. No point avoiding breaking his neck only to have him suddenly stop breathing before they've even finished clearing the place out.

She nods, then reaches out to Garyn's mind and pulls up another force cloak.

We should be concealed from mundane senses again, if you want to press on.

[moonandstar]

Garyn nods.

We're committed now.

He clambers down the border that marked the sentry's post and continues along the gently sloping cavern floor.

As they round the corner of the rock, six toughs in the main chamber enter their view, quite taken at the moment with a game of nine-holes. One of them, a short, lean fellow dressed in leather armor with a shortsword and buckler at his side, casts a glance back toward them.

Garyn's heart skips a beat before he remembers they can't be seen. Then he begins to creep along toward their left flank.

[last_kallig]

Ibani moves with Garyn until they are close enough to spring an ambush. The force cloak conceals the dual snap-hiss of her new lightsabers flaring to life for the first time.

She's set her sights on the one with the buckler, and as the cloak collapses one lightsaber goes through his back, his heart, and out the other side without even noticeably slowing down. But the other Dunmer don't have much time to gawk at the bar of violet plasma sticking out of the corpse's chest, because the other lightsaber is coming around in a sharp swing toward his neighbor's head.

[moonandstar]

And Garyn's helping! No, really, he is!

Seriously, though, he is. A bald, burly one with a warhammer strapped across his back gets a blade though the gut, his body laced with magical electricity as he dies in his seat.

The man next to him reaches desperately for his longsword. Garyn steps on his hand. He isn't left the time to count his favorite vital organs before they're spilled onto the floor.

[last_kallig]

Of course he's helping, he's her partner in this! Although the lightsaber noise alone may prompt attention from elsewhere in a minute, if only in a 'what the heck is that weird noise', sense.

The last one who was at the table gets decapitated with a double cross sweep of her lightsabers.

Hm, hadn't realized how much my previous lightsabers were fighting me. This will be a more useful exercise than I had anticipated.

[moonandstar]

That leaves one - this one slight, and armed with a bow and shortsword. He had been lucky enough to be the only one around the table who was standing. He's slinking off - hoping, no doubt to alert his friends or perhaps get a shot in from the edge of the room.

No such luck. Garyn bounds after him and tackles him from behind. The results are academic from there.

He does, however, have time to cry out.

[last_kallig]

"Oh well," Ibani says quietly, eyeing the height of the ceilings. "We were bound to draw some attention sooner or later."

She doesn't seem terribly concerned about this. "Be interesting to see what those mages can manage in a pinch. I haven't seen much local magic."

[moonandstar]

The main chamber splits into two hallways, one in each direction. The clamor appears to be coming from both of them.

Garyn points toward the hallway on the left.

"Let's jump them. Best not to fight them all at once."

[last_kallig]

"I like that plan," Ibani replies. "Left it is!"

Ibani charges left, armored boots, hitting the ground very fast.

Surprise, thugs, you can have a Sith AND a mercenary, special one time only deal!

[moonandstar]

Garyn follows very closely behind, trusting Ibani's senses to lead the way. Not that the two spearmen and a battlemage will be hard to spot. If they're fortunate, they'll catch the mage before he throws his fireball and not after.

[last_kallig]

Sadly, they do not catch the mage before the fireball. Ibani lacks the fire resistance of a Dunmer, but the armor IS designed to withstand plasma, which helps a little. Even so, some of her flesh burns in the fireball.

She snarls in anger and gives the mage enough force lightning to fry three people.

[moonandstar]

Garyn catches nearly as much of it as Ibani does. If it hadn't been for the armor Ibani had gotten him, he likely would have been a good deal more than singed, Dunmer or no.

He would offer a hand with the two spearmen, but the force lightning powerful enough to kill three people arcs outward from the mage's corpse and, wouldn't you know it, kills all three of them.

[last_kallig]

"Shavit, I was a fool!" Ibani mutters. "Should have put up force shields on the both of us."

"More luck than I deserve that we were not more badly injured."

She shakes her head as if to clear it. "Healing?" she offers.

[moonandstar]

"Save it for now," Garyn says, holding up his hand.

It hurts plenty, of course. Second-degree burns on the side of his neck, among a couple other places. But there's no need to heal anything that isn't life-threatening until they know the threat has been dealt with. Speaking of which...

"There are three of them left. And I don't hear footsteps."

[last_kallig]

Ibani listens to the Force. "Several someones think they're being very sneaky," she muses, eyes shut.

"Ambush waiting, from the feel of it. Not a bad plan, in their situation." She swings one lightsaber in a humming arc through the air to point in the direction of the ambush. (Pity there's cave wall in the way, but what can you do?)

"Won't be enough," she says, opening her eyes.

[moonandstar]

"It's what I'd do," Garyn says. "If I were the sort who didn't mind leaving my comrades for dead."

Garyn nods toward the entry.

"Let's play their game. Approach them cloaked."