Startup 72: Meltdown

Rova 27, shortly before midnight

Quent’s goblintown was nicer than Conchobar expected it to be, on multiple fronts. The houses were well built, with wooden paneling. Guards in Quent livery patrolled openly, and didn’t attract the kind of resentful glares you got in some ports. Goblin girls were a minority on the street, but not to the point that Rowe and the gunnery team were drawing undue attention. Many of the older girls he saw were wearing chain bangles or collars, but as far as he could tell that was the only nod to tradition. The married women carried their chains around with them.

When Conchobar pointed it out to Rowe, she didn’t have any insight on the matter. Indeed, she found the near unique free status of mature goblin women in Quent obvious. She was too busy looking for a goblin run tavern; apparently she really wanted some kind of pineapple drink popular with goblins.

“Quent dumb in a lot of ways.” She had answered. “Smart had to be somewhere. We lucky.”

“Wait, are you telling me that you didn’t know Quent was nice to goblins?” Conchobar asked, “I thought you scouted this place first! What exactly was your plan if someone tried to kidnap you again?”

“Guns, Pearlteeth.” Rowe said, gesturing at the weapons slung over her shoulder and those of the four other goblins. “Guns and magic for danger.”

She turned to their armed escort and switched to goblin.

“What is more important, girls?” She asked, “Safety or tepache?”

“Tepache” was the universal response, including from another goblin passing them on the street.

That had been a few hours ago, shortly after they left Emrys’s quarters, and he had to admit she was right. Not about tepache; it was fine, but it was essentially spiced pineapple juice. He hadn’t been terribly upset when Rowe had drunk his glass while waiting for a refill. It had taken a while for him to fully accept that Rowe wasn’t going to be attacked by kidnappers. If anything, he’d been accosted by more horny goblins than Rowe.

He still wasn’t entirely sure how to broach the topic of attraction with Rowe. He wasn’t shallow, not excessively so. He didn't demand every girl have a face fit to launch a thousand ships… but Rowe had multiple dark moles and a pattern of wrinkles that most gnomes didn’t live long enough to develop. Her physique was reasonably toned, but she was shaped like a 5 year old human child. He could barely register her as female when she wasn’t talking, which wasn’t exactly ideal in a mate.

It’s not even just that she’s a goblin. That one manning the bar doesn’t look terrible. She has a decently smooth face.

“You sleep with her?” Rowe asked.

Conchobar froze, his wine halfway to his lips. How was he supposed to answer that? Rowe didn’t seem upset at the idea. Just curious. She had her head cocked to the side as she studied the barmaid.

“What? No!” Conchobar said. “Why would you ask that?”

Rowe turned back to him and sighed. She switched back to goblin.

“I shouldn’t ask important questions in a stupid language. I didn’t mean to ask if you were going to sleep with her.” She said in lilting goblin verse, “I meant to ask if you would sleep with her, if given the chance. I’ve noticed you haven’t slept with me again so I’m considering why. You haven’t slept with any of these four either so I have concluded that it isn’t because you only sleep with any girl once.”

She said all of this in a perfectly casual tone, as if she were reporting on the weather. Conchobar’s cheeks felt hot.

“You’ve looked at Rosie and Dierdre like that, too, so I have a theory.” She said. “You have a fetish for pregnant looking women with bloated faces, tight skin, and enlarged breasts.”

She was quite proud of her conclusion, arms crossed in front of her. Conchobar’s thoughts took quite a while to right themselves after being blown to the four winds by that smug proclamation. It was so close to accurate while being so completely off base that it could have only come from Rowe. Alas, he didn’t have time to form a response before everything went to shit.

Rattline Rattsberger scrambled into the bar, blood streaming down the side of his face, slamming the door behind him. He locked eyes with Conchobar, pleading. To his credit, Conchobar didn’t freeze the way he once would have. He jumped forward to heal Ratts, who started rambling.

“Quick! Block the doors!” He yelled. “They’re after me! I’ve been looking everywhere for you assholes!”

Rowe tried and failed to immediately drag a table forward to block the entrance, but was too small to quickly maneuver the large table before two dozen smallfolk, mostly thin, runty goblins with poorly affixed fake mustaches, flooded the entryway. At their rear was a tall, fat goblin man who pointed an accusing finger at Conchobar.

“Him!” He yelled in a familiar voice, “That’s the one who stole my horn and my wife!”

Hinson? Why is he a goblin? Why is he attacking us? What the hell?

The entire tavern erupted into a brawl as the invaders broke into a unified war song against the Gnomish seducers. The bar’s more progressive and frequently mixed race patrons responded in kind.

“She’s meant to be more than a smoothskin’s whore!”

“Yes, or a goblin’s, you twits!”

Conchobar even sensed a counter song woven into the attackers’ song, meant to suppress active enchantment. It wasn’t very well done, so it probably wouldn’t have freed anyone even if Rowe had been charmed, but it explained at least part of why they were so upset.

The gunnery crew drew their shotguns and yelled “for Pearlteeth” before opening fire on the offending bard. Hinson leapt behind the bar, with his duped muscle taking a few stray bullets. Rowe threw a firebomb behind the bar after him, causing the expensive **** to ignite instantly in dancing blue flame. Conchobar swallowed his panic and started barking orders, taking command of the fire fighting and rescue effort so quickly that nobody noticed his subordinate was solely responsible.

Things just escalated from there.

By midnight, the entire goblin quarter was consumed by riots as simmering tensions came to the surface.

••••••••••

“Wake up, Dame. I smell trouble.”

Naomi sat up from sleep, the sound of a gruff voice in her head. She looked around in the darkness, alone in Lady Aulamaxa’s room. Her body hummed with tension; there was no way she’d be able to get back to sleep.

She reached out with one hand and pulled the cover off of the eternal lamp, filling the room with light. Her eyes flicked to every corner of the room, expecting to find trouble. Her fingers itched to rest on a revolver she didn’t own. She needed a damn cigarette, even if she’d never had one.

Milo is just making me paranoid. He was murdered, right? He probably wakes all of his binders up like this.

She’d finally chosen a spirit to bind, and the one she’d selected had come from the strangest of places. A spirit forbidden in Cheliax, found in the tome of lore Aaron had given her. She’d combed through his entire entry looking for an explanation. Some great evil to put him on the same list as Vishgurv. There was nothing.

She’d asked Cave Mother, and laughed at the answer. Milo of Clyde, a seeker of truth from a distant land, had been forbidden and his name struck from the records for sedition. He served ably when summoned, but made no secret of his disdain for the dread house of Thrune.

Naomi had liked him immediately. He was the first spirit she’d deliberately called, and he’d appeared as nothing but a man. Clean shaven, face cast in shadow, wearing a strange black jacket like Naomi had seen the captain wearing. He’d been… gentle. Until he’d woken her up just now, she hadn’t even heard a whisper of his voice unless she tried to draw upon his magic.

She dressed and reached for a hooded lantern, intending to head out onto the deck for some fresh air. She needed to calm down. She felt a hand on her wrist.

“Leave the light, Dame.” He said, “You know this joint, right? You don’t need to be seen.”

Naomi jerked her hand away from Milo’s invisible touch, and almost grabbed the lantern anyway just to spite him. Something about his voice made her stop. There was an urgent edge to it. Fear? Or just the same tension she felt?

She didn’t put on the boots Sosima had gotten her either. Her feet were calloused enough that she didn’t need them for anything but fashion, and if she was going to go unseen she might as well go unheard as well.

She padded through the short hallways until she heard a hissed conversation. She recognized the voice: that woman, Varossa, was arguing with Collin. Her heart started beating faster; Collin was a real brute of a man, one of her mother’s disciples. Was Varossa in danger?

She listened at the door, and what she heard was nothing like what she expected.

“I don’t buy it.” Collin said, “The captain’s too soft to try something like that. I’m going to go ask him.”

“By the time you get back he’ll have had her quietly eliminated, just like the others.” Varossa said, “Don’t tell me you really believe his story about what happened in Dragonsthrall?”

There was a rumble of assent from a few of the other cultists.

Lady Aulamaxa said that was Filli. He didn’t order their deaths… did he?

“What do you think, Dame?” Milo asked, sarcastic, “I don’t know this captain of yours but this lady knows how to work a crowd.”

“Fuck off.” Collin said, and Naomi heard heavy footsteps coming towards the door she was listening at. She sprang back, then heard a chorus of shouts as the door opened. Collin swayed in the door frame for a second, then fell face down at Naomi’s feet with a crossbow bolt buried at the base of his skull.

“He’ll be fine.” Varossa said. “That’ll just get him out of the way until he’s reborn.”

She was holding her crossbow easily, pointed at where Collin’s head had been moments prior. Her casual tone ended when she saw Naomi, and the two women locked eyes. Varossa loaded another bolt into the crossbow by touch, so quick it was almost hypnotic.

“Come in here.” Varossa said, voice steady. “I can’t afford trouble right now.”

The moment seemed to stretch into eternity as Naomi considered what surrender would mean. If these people took over the Enterprise and released Mother, she would never get the help she needed. Mother would be let loose on the world to spread her curse. Aaron might be hurt or killed. Lady Aulamaxa would lose her home. Captain M’Dair would be dragged away in a few months. Naomi would be entirely at the mercy of people who barely even pretended to have good intentions.

“No.” Naomi whispered, her heart hammering.

“Get down!” Milo grabbed her by the arm, yanking her to the side as the first crossbow bolt whizzed through the place her head had been. “You don’t even have a piece, we aren’t winning this one!”

Naomi, shaken by the realization that moral victories meant very little in the face of crossbow fire, screamed and ran away. The walls were thin on the Enterprise; with one good shriek she’d already done her part, even as half a dozen burly Vishgurv binders filed out to chase her down.

••••••••••

You are a killer, girl. You and I both know it, so stop torturing yourself and accept it. Decide what else you intend to be, and decide if the wasp women will help you become that.

Cave Mother certainly hadn’t softened the blow when Filli asked for advice. She also hadn’t really given Filli what she had come for. She hadn’t gone to the bitter old spirit to hear that she needed to make this choice herself; she wanted someone trustworthy to tell her if the temple would be good for her.

Even with everything Emrys had discovered for her, she didn’t really know. There were so many holes in her knowledge, things she was too dumb to understand, that Emrys had taken for granted. So she lay on her back and stared at the ceiling.

Then Naomi’s shriek echoed through the ship, and Filli gratefully set aside the question of her future. She felt a tinge of guilt, since Naomi was probably hurt, but Filli was a monster after all. She bounded across the room in two great strides, side stepping Toppin. The other girls were stirring awake, blinking sleep from their eyes.

Filli grabbed the handle on the door and pulled it. It didn’t budge. She looked at the handle, checked to be sure it wasn’t one of the turning kinds, and pushed. Only then did she notice the strange smell coming from the door. Earthy, but with a chemical undertone.

She took a step back to look at the door, and noted that while light from the eternal lantern outside spilled in above and below the door, the side cracks were completely dark. The other girls, four that Filli didn’t properly know, tried to open the door as well, until the panic started to set in.

Something sealing the door. Oh well.

Filli hauled back with her freakish hand, then lunged forward with it forward. Her whole weight concentrated on a single point, and drove through the door all the way to her elbow with a wet, sickening crunch that lanced pain up her arm as her hand went limp. Wooden splinters scraped across her arm as she pulled it back, taking with it thin strips of skin. She hardly noticed the lacerations next to the broken hand, and her bones clicked back into place before she could even appreciate the pain.

“Woah there!” She heard from the other side of the door, “None of that!”

The other girls yelped in fear, eyes wide in the dim light. Perhaps they would have been calmer if she’d been able to warn them. Perhaps not.

She looked through the fist sized hole and saw Creed, halfway through applying a thick black paste to the door into the men’s quarters, especially along the hinges and door frame. The chemical smell flowed through the hole, almost certainly from the wet looking paste. He spritzed something on it from a perfume bottle and turned to meet Filli’s gaze through the hole as the shiny paste turned a dull dark grey and the men started pounding on the door just a few moments too late.

Filli was ripping at the edge of the hole, trying to expand it. It was slow going. The door had been chosen to serve as a barrier of last resort, so it was made of thick, well seasoned wood. She needed to claw at it.

“Stop! Stop that!” Creed commanded, to literally no effect.

What possible reason would she have to wait for him to speak in this situation? She’d heard one of the few people on this ship that she’d had a conversation with screaming. It hadn’t been much of a discussion, just passing back and forth a spare piece of paper to discuss spirit binding, but Naomi had even tried to copy a few drow signs.

He reached into his belt pouch, far too deeply. Nearly his entire arm was inside a bag smaller than Filli’s small fist. He pulled out a glass bottle.

“You stop that right now or I’m tossing this through that hole!” Creed said, “Don’t think I won’t!”

Filli had no idea what that would do, but he certainly said it like it was a threat. She scored the wood on her side of the door again, meeting Creed’s eyes.

“That’s right!” He said, taking her slowed movement for assent. “This is full of blistercap spores. I’d just as soon save them for a rainy day, but if you **** me I’ll toss them in there with you. In a small room like that, every one of you will end up with full body paralysis and a compromised immune system, and that’s if you survive at all.”

Filli’s claws stopped, eyes narrowed. The threat was irrelevant to her, as far as she knew. It was possible she could be affected by a particularly potent poison, but she’d never seen evidence that she could even be poisoned anymore. Too much demonic bile, she supposed.

The other four women were very quiet, however. She glanced at them, and they were staring at her. She could see fear, but Filli was too stupid to know more than that. Were they hoping she’d save them? Were they afraid the dumb rat would doom them all? Why should they trust her, but how could they stop her if they wanted to?

Her mind was ablaze with uncertainty. She hated it.

Every second, Naomi might be hurt. Every second, the situation outside might get worse. I can’t break through the rest of this door quickly; if I keep trying he will be able to do whatever he intends to do.

Emrys probably cares about these people. He’d waste thousands of gold pieces fixing them if he had to. He can’t afford that. There are things Sandara can’t heal, like me, and this may be one of them. He’d be mad at me for putting him in that position. No. He’d be mad at me for putting them in that position. Emrys cares about me, of course he cares about them.

Is Creed bluffing? No. I have to assume he isn’t. If he’s lying and I avoid consequences, that’s just luck. Think, Filli. Think. None of the options are good, so what to choose?

Creed didn’t relax. Filli’s beady black eyes bored into him. While she decided what to do next, the least she could do is hold this man down.

••••••••••

Varossa rolled her eyes at the five idiots who ran after Naomi. A random civilian likely didn’t require more than one or two pursuers, though perhaps she was more than that. Not many could dodge a crossbow bolt mid-flight.

She didn’t have any intention of wasting more time on the girl, however. Collin’s defiance had put this whole operation on a timer. She looked around at the remaining troops at her disposal; the faltering members of Lubo’s little cult. Whipping them up didn’t seem like the right angle to take here.

“Hold on, you all.” She said to them, “The most important thing is that we get Lubo out of the brig. Let’s move, before anyone else wanders along. I don’t think any of us want to fight the rest of the crew.”

That might take a bit of the fire out of them, but it’ll make the plan to steal the ship once we have Lubo easier to swallow. Evading pursuit so we don’t have to kill anyone makes it almost noble.

They moved quickly through the dark hallways, straight to the brig. Vishgurv’s Pactbound fell in behind her, as she’d hoped. They would have to do, at least until Creed finished sealing the crew quarters.

She sighed when she turned the corner and saw that someone on the ship wasn’t a complete idiot. Cog, flanked by Syl and that dwarf who looked at M’Dair like a lost puppy, stood quietly in front of the door.

Divinely protected warrior, vicious but mundane alchemist, and no one important. Target is obvious.

Her first bolt grazed Syl’s shoulder, though it had been aimed for her heart. The speed of the Rahadoumi girl’s dodge confirmed that she had already **** herself. Unfortunate, but to be expected.

“What the hell are you people doing?” Cog demanded, his face flushing so red as to be nearly purple.

“Preventing a ****.” Varossa said smugly, and reloaded her crossbow.

Idiots, all of them.

••••••••••

“Damn it!” Charlie grumbled, “I know you’re cheating somehow!”

“I’m not,” Salem said smugly, “but if I was, what could you even do about it?”

“I could beat your ass raw is what I could do.”

“Promise?” Salem said, eyes sparkling.

Guarding Captain M’Dair was a bit boring for the most part, but it wasn’t a bad job. No oversight, very little foot traffic, nothing to stop them from playing dice and flirting on the job as long as they managed to hold onto a baseline level of professionalism. Occasionally they heard weird noises from inside, but when they checked on him he always seemed to have everything under control. The last two times they’d looked, he’d been carving runes into a sword made of coral, so it didn’t seem likely he’d try anything. Artificers tended to get very invested in their projects.

The door to his room slammed open and a slim drow man in a white undershirt and pants dashed out into the hall. He dissolved into white mist that flew out the nearest window at the end of the corridor.

“Who the fuck was that?” Salem asked.

“I don’t know.” Charlie said, snatching his whip, “I didn’t think he had any guests.”

The two looked into the guest room and saw a very frazzled Captain Cusswell staring wide eyed at Captain M’Dair, who was standing next to the spot where he’d been working. The coral sword was on the floor, seemingly dropped there and forgotten.

“Ve’ra?” Cusswell asked.

“No, Rosie.” Captain M’Dair said sharply, glancing towards the open door. “Obviously I’m just good old Emrys. Anyway, would you all care for a third? I need a break and I’d kill to play for a few rounds.”