Bloodsong's Oasis - Jazz Club and Speakeasy

[Ironsmith]

"I mean, either way, the takeaway is that they stayed away from anyone who was in any position to call their bluff." Rose points out. "Good technique, up to a point. Eventually the fact that you're hiding from the authorities becomes a reason for suspicion in of itself."

[Morty]

Askeladd waves his hand in response to Krayger's question. His depth of knowledge about this topic might be suspicious, but it's not as if Krayger or Rose have any reason to find it so.

"In a way. They are descended from a bloodline that was blessed by great elemental dragons in the past... or so they say. Whatever the truth of it is, the dragons' blood does flow in the Scarlet Dynasty and some of them awaken into power in their adolescence. They use this power to enforce their will." Looking over to Rose, he adds: "It was a balancing act, yes. We had to be quick about it. And we thought it was all over when we ran into a Dragon-Blooded of about two hundred years of age, who would have been my partner's great-grandmother according to the story we cooked up."

[Keeper]

”So you actually went through the records to make your false identities. It gives and extra layer of authenticity. But does…create those kinds of problems.”
Not that Krayger knows much about it, having only done that kind of job once.

[Ironsmith]

"This is why you always play the part of a visitor." Rose chuckles, shaking her head. "You build up a solid backstory for people to check and 'verify', but which is still unfamiliar enough to most people there that you're not exposing yourself by not fulfilling a particular shibbolbeth or missing information you should have. Better to be slightly suspicious in an excusable way than to risk being caught with your proverbial pants down."

[Morty]

"Perhaps you are right," Askeladd admits. "It could be that we committed an elementary mistake of schemers and created too elaborate a plan. Regardless, it didn't matter... because the Dragon-Blooded considered keeping track of her mortal descendants and relatives to be unworthy of her attention. She was a busy woman." He drops this revelation after building up to it, like a practiced storyteller.

[Keeper]

Krayger chuckles. "So, she gave you a heart attack without ever knowing and then went along with her day?"

[Ironsmith]

"It could have been more awkward. Imagine if they broke down right then." Rose smirks. "I have to tell you about Madrid sometime. Most aggravating way to blow cover ever."

[Morty]

"There was a very nervous moment... but I think she simply assumed we were showing her the deference she was due as one of the Exalted." A smile plays under Askeladd's beard. "It's easy to slip under the attention of those too proud to look downwards." He glances over to Rose. "I get the impression you have stories to tell to match the one I just shared."

[Ironsmith]

"Ah, well..." Rose teases, looking up and down the bar in a theatrically surreptitious way. "I've got a hundred and one of those, yeah. But they all involve stuff that's more than a little raunchy. Crucial stuff, even." She grins. "There's a whole technique a girl develops when half her job is getting into bed with people she's gonna steal from. See, it's always a seductress's job to read people... the mark, their associates, even random passersby, because you never know when someone's going to provide crucial information. But when things get intimate, that's when they start letting out all of the stuff they normally keep locked up deep down somewhere they hope nobody's ever going to find it." She grins sways back and forth in her stool, scooting her hips suggestively. "So there are a lot of... well, I want to say 'breakthroughs', but that sounds euphemistic, but that's more or less literally what they are... okay, epiphanies that I've come to whilst in the middle of a rodeo, and that one I do mean in the euphemistic sense." She waves her hand. "So let me get a few more of these in me before I start pulling any of them out. I promise it'll be more entertaining that way. Besides, I kinda got the impression you weren't done."

[Keeper]

Krayger shrugs.
"Can't say I've done...any of that. But usually you keep your head down and play dumb folks will be all to eager to assume it ain't an act. No matter how much it exposes their throats."

[Morty]

It's clear Rose is a practiced seductress. Of course, her charms don't work on Askeladd, but he can objectively recognize them. And if she were to try to seduce him and found herself stymied by his lack of interest in women, she would likely find another angle of approach. A dangerous woman.

"I have certainly used playing the dense barbarian to some success, when dealing with the Realm elite." He nods to Krayger. "But yes, I should finish my story. We scurried out of the old Exalt's sight, and she likely forgot about us the moment we were gone. Then we proceeded to free the hostages the Realm had taken from the local tribes. I wonder if she ever found out who did that."

[Ironsmith]

"Hopefully not. Usually the best state you can leave after a mission is one where you're welcome back any time." Rose grins. "Which... might be one of the bigger unsung advantages of seduction, but it's true across the board, really. The alternative is blacking out different areas where you can't operate for fear of being recognized and eventually having so many you're useless for infiltration."

[Keeper]

"How many hostages are we talking?" Krayger asks.
"I imagine evacuating a decent sized group would be no easy feat."

[Morty]

"There were four hostages. We were able to smuggle them out in a wagon carrying our personal effects. It wasn't easy. The essential part was doing so quickly enough that the manor wasn't put on alert yet." He doesn't add that it would have been impossible without Lunar magic helping them. "All in all, this excursion did make it too dangerous to show our faces there again, as you say. But it had to be done quickly, before the Realm was able to twist the tribes' arm too much." Of course, the faces they had at the time weren't their own... but that's also not something he'll bring up.

[Ironsmith]

"Yeah, that checks out. I did say it was the ideal, not that it would always play out that way. Shit happens." Rose shrugs and takes a sip of her drink. "And you saved four lives and averted a crisis, which is probably worth losing a couple of areas of operation for a couple of agents. All in all, not a bad day's work." She arches an eyebrow at Askeladd, barely hiding a smirk; the sort of look she might give him if she had just told an inside joke.

[Keeper]

"Truly, one should be so lucky to have their jobs go so flawlessly. That's not something that I can say happens near so consistently."
In and out with only a single scare? He'd take a pay cut to have his jobs go so smoothly.

[Morty]

"Perhaps we were indeed lucky." He knows they weren't, of course. A mortal would need luck to pull it off. But not Lunar Exalted. "So here's to a successful operation... and hopefully many more to come." He raises his glass.

[Ironsmith]

"Yeah. To getting lucky." Rose grins, raising her own glass and clinking it against Askeladd's with a little tink.

Multiple entrendes totally intended, of course.

[Keeper]

"I'm quite sure someone like you doesn't need much luck for these things." Krayger says with a warm smile, toasting Askeladd's glass as well.
He means someone who comes across as competent and in-control as Askeladd does, but of course there's a few reasons he's right.

[Morty]

"Why, thank you." Krayger indeed doesn't know how right he is. Askeladd appreciates the compliment towards someone the minotaur thinks is a mortal. Rose's double entendre escapes him - while he's acutely aware of social interactions, it's not an expression he's familiar with. "I would be glad to hear about either of your exploits, if you're in the mood to recount them."

[Ironsmith]

"Well, all right." Rose shrugs and leans back in her stool, not seeming to realize or care that there wasn't any meaningful back support on the thing. "But before I do, I've got a little tone-setter for the two of you, bit of a thought experiment. I want you to think of the most evil, ruthless, sadistic, blight-upon-humanity sort of monster you can conceive. The absolute worst of the worst. The kind of person that makes your skin crawl and your stomach do cartwheels when you realize that the pits of hell opened up and spat out this sin against gods and man as a sign of the end times.

...And I want you to tell me what their favorite color is."

[Keeper]

Krayger's answer is immediate and without irony.
"Teal," he says simply, crossing his arms.
This probably isn't the answer Rose was thinking of.

[Morty]

Askeladd's answer is likewise immediate and natural. The worst person he can think of? Yes, there is such a person, alright. And her favorite color is...

"Scarlet."

[Ironsmith]

Rose gives the two of them a slightly startled look. Evidently, she wasn't expecting them to have that information as readily on-hand as they did.

Fortunately, she recovers quickly enough to get on with her story.

"Well. Sounds like you two have given this a bit more thought than most." Rose continues, leaning forward to rest her elbows on the bar, taking a deep breath before abruptly transitioning into her own story. "I was sent out to cut my teeth on a mark by the name of Herbert Quire-Kincaid. This being my first real mission, you see. It sounded like it should be simple enough; touch base with an Almanian R&D tech, use him to get the credentials needed to get into their system, and from there our cyber division would handle all the dirty little details. I just needed to get to his home computer."

"Now..." Rose folds her hands in front of her. "I don't know if I've ever told you about the sorts of things the People's Republic of Almany were infamous for. Making liberal use of subdermal scalpels as an interrogation device, for example. Or live chemical disincorporation as a disposal method... well, actually, live corpse disposal methods in general. They're very big on efficiency over there, and Old Earth scum like us didn't really merit enough sympathy for that to be any more amoral than tossing soup in a garbage disposal. ARC tells all of us recruits those horror stories early on as a way of bracing us up against what we're likely to encounter. One of my trainers even did us the courtesy of showing pictures." She pauses, taking a sip from her drink, letting that image sink in for the two of them.

"So it goes without saying, I was expecting a brute." She continues. "After all, what sort of person is just... okay with that? Treating other human beings that way? Probably not anybody that has any business calling themselves human, really."

[Keeper]

Krayger takes a long sip from his drink, holding it in two hands.
A lot of that was word salad to him but he got the gist.
”That’s pretty fucked up.” he puts it simply.

[Morty]

Askeladd looks... unperturbed would be the wrong word, but there's a firm understanding in his eyes.

"People can sink to frightening depths once they convince themselves that their victims aren't truly people. Or lower than they are by definition... so anything done to them is either justified or inconsequential. But it seems like your expectations didn't bear out."

[Ironsmith]

"Well, not at first." Rose replies, glancing sidelong st Askeladd as she continues her story. "It turns out Herb was actually quite the romantic. Responded very well to the whole nice-girl-at-the-bar act. Tipped generously. Didn't make great conversation at first, but he kind of opened up the more I laughed at his jokes and made it clear that he wasn't going to faze me with whatever he was going to say next." She leans into Krayger and gives him a dopey grin. "Most people are really just big, jiggly balls of insecurity when you get down to it. Getting into their rooms comes down to about 80% listening and smiling, really."

"Anyway, tangent aside, yeah, Herb was a pretty sweet guy. To be honest, I did feel a bit bad for, you know, stealing his credentials and getting him executed for treason." She frowns. "...Well, I say 'a bit', but... I don't think I need to explain it in-depth to you. Shit's fucked."

Rose upends her glass, finishing the drink and wiping the excess off her lips. "...Of course, being young and stupid and not knowing when to let things go, I decided I was going to avenge Herb. Guy didn't deserve what was done to him."

[Keeper]

"So you found that he was less war criminal than the rest, and took it upon yourself to avenge him on the basis that everyone else's schemes are what made what happened necessary."
It is, after all, hard to avenge someone that you essentially got killed yourself.
"I imagine this went very poorly very quickly."

[Morty]

"Hmm. The danger of conspiracy and infiltration. It's not as easy to shut off empathy and sentiment as some people make it look." It's a complicated story, no doubt, but Askeladd has sympathy for Rose here.

[Ironsmith]

"That depends." Rose shrugs, accepting another drink from the bartender. "From an objective, mission-oriented perspective, I'd say it went pretty well. I tracked down the guy who signed the order, the lady who actually carried out the order, and the guy in between who handled the arrest. Even managed to get them into the same room." She shrugs. "That's a whole story unto itself, but also sort of beside the point. But I learned some interesting things about the three of them."

"First, the guy who signed the order. Brayden Lee." She rests her chin on her fist and shakes her head. "Something already kind of fucked about that. If some guy signs your actual death warrant, you'd at least want it to have some gravitas, right? Their name should be something weighty, like... I don't even know. But not Brayden, god." She sighs. "Anyway, putting emotions aside for a minute, it's... not really hard to see why he did that. The facts said Herb betrayed the entire planet and compromised global security in the process, putting billions of people at risk. He didn't actually know any better until well after Herb's execution. But you know what the man did when I confronted him with evidence of Herb's innocence?"

"He shrugged."

Rose sighs and shakes her head. "He considered it a settled matter. Nothing he did was going to revert the sentence. Herb was dead regardless of whether he was innocent or not. Innocent, guilty, it didn't matter, it was done and revisiting the case wasn't going to accomplish anything. Sure, I could hold him accountable for it, insist that he'd need to be punished for doing a bad job and ordering an unnecessary death (his words, not mine), but up until I told him that, Herb's case was indistinguishable from those of actual traitors he handled every day. What was he supposed to do, angst over a statistical inevitability? Would things have been any better if he did? He considered Herb a casualty. One errant data point in a system that otherwise served the greater good. Some poor sap caught up in the crossfire of interglobal conflict. It wasn't fair that he died over it, but if there was anyone to blame..."

Rose's voice trails off and she sighs. "...Worst part is that he was right. I guess he got that, at least."