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Snippet #2703752

located in World of Skaerra, a part of Skaerra: The Unlikely Tale, one of the many universes on RPG.

World of Skaerra

Welcome to Skaerra

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Characters Present

Character Portrait: Danairia Feyn Character Portrait: Ya'weh
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Into the harbor, pulled a ship. Very little was different about it from the many other vessels. However, unlike the countless merchant ships around it which hoped to profit from the season of Syel'Breh, it had other business to attend to.

Tumhathil's eyes slowly opened, his lids revealing a pair of legs below him, his head resting upon them. He felt warm;...safe. A gentle, female voice hummed above him as he inhaled the initial breath of consciousness. But who was this he was resting upon? Why did this moment feel so familiar? He closed his eyes again, listening to the woman hum...
...
His eyes shot open.

"Iya?"

Zilindar stares down at him a moment before blinking.

..."Get up, Hillitim."

Tumhathil rubbed his eyes and did as he was commanded, standing up from the deck, as the two beds they were provided were too small for him to comfortably sleep on. He did not care though. He had not slept-in in ages and here he was, waking up in the mid-afternoon. He almost felt guilty, as though he had taken something that was not his. Nevertheless, it was a wonderful feeling.

Too bad he knew the days to sleep in were now, once again, over.

Tumhathil and Zilindar stepped down the ramp to shore among men offloading crates from the ship's deck. Even when on a voyage with a completely different purpose, it seems there is always room for trade. The felidine could not help but think of Lucius' words.

"Ain't no rest for the wicked, I suppose"...

A man, who appears to be overseeing the whole operation, is approached by the captain of the crew and seems to converse with him for a moment before looking in the direction of the slave and master. He looks back to the captain, who nods, before committing to approach.

Zilindar steps forward, taking the initiative to assert himself as the one to talk to. Taking the queue, the man dressed in rough, Dhomani garb addresses the slave master in a heavy accent.

"I'm told you're hunting someone for my associate?"

Kail nods.

"Well then, gentlemen," he says, glancing at the both of them. "If you will please follow me."


----


It was too close for comfort. If Ya'weh, Zoni, Hans, and Tiberius had been but a moment slower in their mad dash aboard the ship...

"...Get aboard," ordered Tiberius.

"You, sir, are one hell of a friend!" Yelled Hans as he practically threw Ya'weh over his shoulders and helped her follow Tiberius onto the ship. Zoni held the rear as she rapidly knocked and loosed another arrow, yet again failing to find a home in one of the lightning-fast targets. As soon as Zoni stepped on deck, members of the crew, still confused at what was going on, hurried to lift up the ramp. Unfortunately, that would not be quite enough...

While the two assassins who reinforced the original slowed to a stop after seeing the gap from dock to ship, the first one that had attacked Hans did not falter. Rather, if anything, he increased his pace and looked as though he was going to try and make the jump. With the dexterity of a pouncing leopard, he hopped in full sprint onto a crate at the edge of the dock and leaped forward, landing on the deck of the ship after what would have been an impossible stunt for any regular person.

Zoni attempted to knock back another arrow but could not acquire one from her quiver before the assassin sent a dagger her way. With Zoni suppressed, the masked man raised his sword to strike the bar hand.

As Hans helplessly raised his hand out in front of him to protect himself, he found himself shoved aside by Tiberius and watched as the captain of the ship raised a crossbow and, after acquiring his target, launched a bolt into the man's chest at point-blank range. The assassin stumbled back with a gasp, struggling to maintain his footing. Zoni, having since recovered, already had an arrow knocked back. Her fingers slipped from their grasp on the string, loosing the arrow and planting it in the other side of the assassin's chest, causing him to fall back against the railing.

A member of the crew closed in, unsheathing a utility knife.

"Back!" Shouted Zoni to the man as she drew another arrow from her quiver and knocked it back. The crew member halted, letting Zoni move forward to unleash the arrow upon the assassin, pinning the mask to his face by the left eye slit. With the death blow dealt, the intruder expired, toppled over the rail and fell into the water.


Hans wiped a bead of sweat from his head. It had been a fair length of time since that encounter had ended but he still felt uneasy from it.

"I never properly thanked you for that save earlier..." Hans confessed from the seat across Tiberius' desk in his quarters. The sun has since begun to creep over the horizon, providing a limited source of light through the window.

"Which one?" The captain said through a grin as he removed a pipe from his coat and dusted it off on his clothing. "When I let you on or when I kept your head on your shoulders?"

"Both, I suppose," Hans said, twiddling his thumbs.

Tiberius placed the pipe between his lips.

"You didn't thank me for offering your friends a place to rest either."

"Yeah," Hans chuckled nervously.

Tiberius struck a match, lighting the tobacco in his pipe.

"In that case..." he said before taking a drag. "...why don't you make it up to me by telling me what that was all about?"

He paused.

"...And how you're surviving this long outside of that inn. I don't think I've ever seen you outside of that place in all the times I've been to Opynonias, actually."

"I don't work that much. I just regularly work nights. Didn't you know that?"

Tiberius removes the pipe and points the stem at Hans from across the desk.

"You're still the hardest worker I've ever known, and-hey-you mean to tell me you've never gone to the market before heading to work?"

The bar hand shrugs.

"I go after work when it first opens. Less crowded."

The captain looks at the man before lightly nodding his head and reinserting the pipe back into his mouth.

"No wonder you aren't that tired yet."

He shook his head.

"We're off-topic. What were those people after you for?"

"I don't know," Hans sighed. "Rumor has it among my patrons that people allegedly associated with the criminal underworld have been seen accompanied by men with blank, white masks, with the only features being eye slits but only when they've killed someone."

"You just described the bucket of shit we dumped over the side earlier..." Tiberius said flatly.

"That would be my point," Hans confirmed. "I don't know what I did to piss anyone off, let alone one of those people...Unless..."

Hans rifled through his memories for people he recently came into contact with who had any connections to individuals on the wrong side of the law.

...An easy feat, considering one of the few people he knows to fit that criteria just assaulted an unknown number of Imperial soldiers and then escaped slavery.

"...Yeah...I think I know what happened..."

Hans sighed.

"A certain friend of mine got into some trouble with a man named Avoni de Noppona a few months back and ended up enslaved as a gladiator because of him. She just recently escaped and I cleaned her up before giving her money for passage to Khi'ir. Maybe the wrong person saw. Maybe they told Avoni and he wasn't very pleased about her escape..."

"Hans, I didn't know you were a criminal!" Tiberius teases.

"Ah~go to Hell," Hans says swiping his palm down as if he were slapping his friend's words out of the air.

"Alright, well, I don't know the city like you do so fill me in. Who's this..." Tiberius waves his open hand around in a circle in front of him.

"...A-..I-Ivory?"

"-Avory," Hans corrects.

"-I know what I said.-So, this Avory character. What's so special about him?" Tiberius asks.

"Not too many people know this, but the guy's a crook. I don't know exactly what he does but he's got his fingers deep in the black market and he's got a lot of friends in town."

Tiberius lightly shakes his head.

"You can't go back there...None of you can."

"What should we do?" Hans asks.

"Well," Tiberius begins. "My crew is heading North. I can drop you all off at our next stop, if you want."

Hans pauses, thinking.

"...No...No, I need you to take us to Khi'ir."

Tiberius raises an eyebrow.

"Okay, I know you're smarter than that. The place is in the complete opposite direction from what I have planned. In fact, an entire ocean in the complete opposite direction from what I have planned."

"Just hear me out," Hans pleas. "By the time we get there, they will be celebrating Syel'Breh. So-"

"-Which is exactly why I'm not going there." Tiberius interrupts. "You don't think there's going to be a thousand-and-a-half ships there to trade alone? Every merchant knows what's up with that place. The smart ones stay back and sell for higher price where the demand is much higher."

"Buddy, I serve you people every night. I know what all that is about. Now, listen and follow along."

Hans stands.

"Merchants, they set up shop there for the week and what do they do?"

Tiberius shrugs.

"They sell whatever garbage they brought."

"Close," Hans says, holding up a finger. "They set the prices."

"Set the prices super-damn-high," adds Tiberius.

"You know why?" Hans asks.

"Because the Syakhi haggle like a corrupt tax collector," Tiberius answers.

"Exactly. But, what if you didn't?"

Tiberius squints at the man in front of him as if his skin just turned into a different color.

"Then everyone else would sell their items and I wouldn't?"

Hans holds up his finger again.

"...Not if you dropped your price before putting up the sign saying you won't haggle. They'll come to you to look at the price and leave but, if they can't get anyone else down below what they saw with you and they want it enough, they'll come back for it."

"I still wouldn't make enough for it all to be worth the time I'd have to commit," said Tiberius.

"Yeah," Hans admitted, "but do you remember when I set you up with that cargo swap a while back?"

Tiberius' expression drops.

"...Stop it."

But Hans presses on.

"Saved you a whole trip of loss. That other captain went to his original destination with your cargo and you even got to go home for a little while and visit your father, remember?-"

"-Hans, I hate my father's guts.-"

"-And you even made bank on that wine shipment he traded to you too.-"

"-Only because there was a problem with the lord's shipment.-"

"-Got a nice break after such a long string of voyages...-"

"-Alright..." Tiberius says, finally caving into his friend's push. "...Alright."

He leans back into his chair, taking a deep drag from his pipe.

"...Why the hell do you want to go there anyway? I guarantee decking your friend in the face for getting you in this mess isn't going to be anywhere near worth calling my dept to you for a trip across the damn ocean."

Hans chuckles at the thought.

"I'm not looking for revenge. If they came after me, they'll probably be hunting her next. It'd probably be for the best if I let her know what's going on and stuck together with her until things cooled down."

Tiberius nodded.

"That's probably for the best. What about those other girls you brought on bored?"

The bar hand rested an elbow on his palm and scratched his chin.

"I feel bad for dragging them into this whole mess. Perhaps they could help out while you're in Khi'ir. They are pretty tough after all. Is there any way you could accommodate them on the return trip?"

"I s'ppose," the captain said. "I'd talk it over with them first, though. They need to be apart of this plan if they are going to be so heavily affected by it."

"Yeah," agreed Hans. "I'll tell 'em."

----

Tumhathil sat in a room with his master. The strange-looking furniture was only dimly lit by the covered windows yet the felidin could feel the heat seeping through much more easily. Zilindar's bald head was clearly doing him no favors in keeping the sweat from dripping down.

Their guide had since abandoned them with instruction to wait until he returned after finding them a guide, yet Tumhathil could not help but feel forsaken. It had been a few hours since the man had left.

Finally, someone pushed aside the curtain which covered the entrance into their room. It was the guide.

"Follow me. He's right downstairs."

Their guide spoke in his thick accent as they were led through the house and down to the first floor.

"Apparently, the one you are after has caused a bit of a stir in the city and has escaped. The good news for us is that, as a result, she has procured the attention of the city guard and now they are offering a fair sum of silvers for her capture or demise. Upon the promise of an addition to the reward, I was able to get a rather skilled tracker with decent knowledge of the land."

The guide brushes another curtain aside and walks into the room previously hidden behind it, followed closely by the slave and master. A crossbow leans against one of the chairs. In the chair sits a rather thin but built man, wearing a mixture of leather and chain mail armor...

The man looks up through the coppergate helmet on his head and grins.

"Pleasure to make your acquaintance."