Dockside Intrigue (OPEN)

[Jade Margery]

((This is just a little quest, open for up to two other characters, PM for plot details but feel free to jump in))

The sun was setting on the water in a golden blaze, lighting the cloud-streaked sky with incredible colors. The sight almost made up for the smell.

Ports almost never smell good. Sure, the sea breeze is bracing and salty and all that, but it's a rare wind that can clear the stench of sweat and pitch, fish and rot, mangy animals and equally mangy people. Some people could get used to such a pervading odor eventually, but Jade was not currently one of those people. Her wanderings had brought her to this place, and for curiosity she was willing to forsake comfort. She had never been near ships before, and spent the whole day exploring and generally getting in the way.

The glamor was gone now though, replaced by fish smells and a cold breath off the sea that reminded her she had yet to find a place to sleep that night. Jade was stubbornly ignoring the darkening sky at her back, preferring to sit at the end of one of the piers and throw giblets of fish over the water for her pet crow, Craven, to catch. Her legs dangled off the edge, bare feet kicking although the water was some ten feet below.

Craven caught the last morsel neatly and winged his way back to his customary perch on top of her head. Jade began to stand, but movement caught her eye and she stilled.

Two piers over, three men were carrying a crate toward a small sailing ship. This was not an unusual thing in and of itself, but the docks were mostly empty of workers and seamen at this time of day, and something about their attitudes troubled her. They moved the same way she did when she was doing something she wasn't supposed to; careful with every step, looking around at all times, nervous. They hadn't seen her yet. Jade scooted back behind a stack of supplies on her pier and watched them through a crack between two barrels. She would have bet her last copper that they were up to no good.

[Bevel]

A pair of dark eyes flicked back and forth over the silent wharf, darting their focus around like an invisible, nervous grasshopper. And make no mistake - this was most assuredly a wharf, not a pier. 'Pier' as a term managed to retain some semblance of respectability. This barnacle-ridden, misbegotten freak of a structure was useful mainly for its smell, whose marine pungency would keep onlookers away.

He'd picked a good place, figured Bevel, marveling briefly at the retreating brilliance of the sun. The SBS Catena tugged absently behind him, creaking at its ropes like a seagoing pack mule. Which the old beater was, reasoned Bevel, raking his gaze disapprovingly over its pitted frame. Sail had apparently not gone out of vogue in the more backwater regions of Althanas, something that sent a rare pang of homesickness up his spine.

"What I wouldn't give for a good ironclad," muttered Bevel.

In addition to being completely unarmored, Catena bore herself a miniscule armory: a threadbare trio of cannon, a seven-pound smoothbore mounted in the bow and a pair of eight-pounders defending her flanks. They were milled, rather than cast, from some atrocious thinness of cheap iron and looked ready to send Catena straight to the briny depths when they doubtlessly exploded. They also left her aft entirely undefended, another thing with which Bevel failed entirely to empathize. He always covered his.

A shout and a few grunts of whoa and oi, 'at's me foot snapped the drow out of his reverie. He planted his pudgy fists over Catena's rail to peer downwards, where one of the ne'er-do-well's he'd hired had almost dropped the crate over the wharf's edge.

"Oi, careful with that!" he hissed at the swabbies, not really knowing why he bothered to be quiet on an empty dock. The hired first mate, a gangly type resembling nothing so more as an ambulatory moray eel with his weak chin and piggy eyes, glanced up. "Yes, you lot - you break the cargo and we'll never fence it!"

"Well, maybe ye'd like ter lend a hand," the first mate fired back. His West Country nautical brogue lent him a bizarre air of credibility on the brine-stained dock. "The devil be ye whackin' off ter while we're doin' all the work down 'ere?" he asked, sending his mates into a cannonade of laughter.

Bevel simply brandished the pay ledger at them.

They shut up.

"Good," he muttered, and went back to keeping watch. His dark eyes had earlier followed a crow as it swooped around, catching something -flies, maybe?- out of the air. It had since vanished.

He disregarded it.

[Ryudo]

The hustle and bustle of the evening rush was in full swing, people pushed past each other, each in a rush to go to their respective jobs. A few sailors were making a ruckus in a local pub, shouts could be heard, along with the occasional Crack! The smell of the docks was truly nauseating, causing people to cover their noses with a handkerchief or whatever was on hand.

Repulsive. What an outstanding word to describe the situation at hand Ryudo thought as he walked into the harbor. Ordinarily, Ryudo wouldn’t be caught dead in such a filthy place. However, he was in search of information, and a harbor was an excellent place to find information.
As Ryudo looked around at the scene before him, he was struck by just how uncivilized everyone was acting. People were openly displaying drunkenness in the street, while others were surely up to no good. Ryudo spotted a few shady characters near an old abandoned house, along with a few ladies of the night. As Ryudo walked past the ladies, he saw that they were clearly a part of that age old practice. They were all dressed in clothes that had probably looked nice thirty years ago. They wore their hair up, in attempt to draw attention away from their missing teeth. It was hard for Ryudo to decide which smelt worse, the harbor or the women. One of them called out to him,

“Hey, there’s a live one,” they all laughed a shrill, cruel laugh, “how ‘bout a night on the town there. I’m as cheap as they come!” She laughed again; a few of the other women had walked towards Ryudo.

Wonderful... The sun had begun to set, and Ryudo realized that the true scum were coming out to greet the night. He stopped walking, and a few of the ladies began to gather around him.

“Sorry Ladies, unfortunately I do not wish to engage you in your…profession.” And with that Ryudo began to walk away, he heard the women calling out to him as he disappeared.

As Ryudo continued he began to notice that there was some commotion near one of the docks. A ship had approached it, and shouts could be heard coming from the crew. Ryudo was intrigued, perhaps one of the sailors had the information he was seeking. If they had the information Ryudo was looking for then he could leave this god-forsaken place, and get back to being a respectable mercenary. One can only hope...

[Jade Margery]

Jade had once heard it said that curiosity was the bane of women-kind. She couldn't speak for other females, but it was certainly a driving instinct in her mind. Interest tickled by the secretive behavior of the men was further irritated by the appearance of a portly dark elf, of all things! Jade had never seen a dark elf before in her life. He certainly didn't look like the stories described, and indeed she was in some doubt as to what he might actually be. But then, what other races had dusky skin and long ears like that?

That these fellows were engaged in something illegal was beyond doubt. But if this was a smuggling operation, wouldn't there have been more goods? One crate was hardly worth a whole ship, even a small one. So, whatever was in there had to be of tremendous value.

Jade considered her options, then undid her vest and stowed it with her traveling sack between two of the crates--it was the only nice article of clothing she had. She also stuck her shoes under an empty burlap sack and almost added her daggers to the stash, but then thought the better of it and slipped them into the waist of her skirt, pulling her out blouse and over the hilts.

Craven, who had tolerated this movement from his perch on her head, lost patience when she slipped feet first into the water on the other side of the small dock. He gave an indignant caw and flapped ungracefully into the air to find a perch on one of the ship's spars.

She fell ten feet into water that was much colder than she thought it would be, water that seemed to suck her under like a hungry beast. She had dropped with her feet together and pointed to minimize the splash, but given the constant sound of waves crashing and lapping at the wharf, all she accomplished was to send herself almost to the bottom of the shallow harbor floor.

Jade kicked hard, flailing her arms. She wasn't a good swimmer, never having done more than paddling about in a warm pond or small lake, but she could keep herself afloat. Her hands found one of the barnacle-encrusted wooden pilings and she half-climbed, half swam her way back to air. She broke the surface, gasping, and clutched at the support until she got her breath back.

She waited there to make sure no one had heard her, but the men with the crate did not seem to have cared and she couldn't see the small drow at this angle. It would have been nice if Craven had put up a fuss and made a distraction at this point, but since he seemed to be missing the fabled intelligence of his race, he just sat and preened himself high above the proceedings. Useless feather-duster! Jade held until the men mostly had their backs to her and then pushed off her piling towards the other pier, trying to splash as little as possible and trusting to luck that they would not turn around to see her bobbing in the water like a lost bottle.

[Bevel]

"Mr. Lench," called the drow, "prepare to set sail."

The first mate completely failed to salute. "Right, yeh louts!" he yelled, projecting his voice below deck and to the riggings alike. "Prepare ter set sail! You - Welborn - quit playin' that thar stringbox an' help with th' riggins. Sullie! Secure th' rudder an' make it snappy! 'Offmann, yeh greasy lout..."

The crew of a dozen-and-a-half or so rough-looking and unwashed louts fell about untying ropes and carrying supplies. A trio of sailors backpedaled with a heavy rope, slowly dragging a large single sail up the mast, while numerous crates of cargo found themselves quickly tied down with whiskery cord. A crow or raven that had settled itself in the spars took off with a feathery caw when the ropes started flying.

Bevel scanned once over the proceedings before satisfiedly shoving both thumbs into his belt. As long as the crew were working, things would run smoothly. See, Bevel knew the folktales. You just don't let your hired goons off the leash, because they'll wander off and get themselves (and you) into trouble. Perhaps they'd get drunk and tip off a passing adventurer, or drop some idiotic clue within reach of investigators. Whatever the means, the chance of idle mooks bringing trouble back approached one hundred percent the longer they went without something to do.

Currently, Catena sagged nine barnacles -his improvised unit of measurement- lower in the water than she should. Whether this was a new leak she'd developed to annoy him or simply the old barge not taking modifications well he didn't know. Bevel marked it down on his mental ledger under Things To Check When I Have The Time.

A block-and-tackle deck crane went past him with a screeee!! noise, hauling a pallet with the final few crates aboard. The drow pulled out his ledger and thumbed through its crisp pages, before tapping a pudgy finger upon it. He gave an inward belch of satisfaction - or was that the fish n' chips from earlier? Regardless, all the crates he'd planned for were now aboard.

"So far, old boy," he congratulated himself, "so good."

Bevel's poker face metamorphosed into a more traditional satisfied half-smirk. He wouldn't let it progress into a full grin until his precious gold was in the coffers, but things were certainly looking up. He felt good. A collection of minor artifacts rested in those crates - nothing magical, that is, except metaphorically. That big one over there contained five Kachuk funerary masks, forged some time ago and worth a pretty penny for historical significance. That barrel next to it? A simple small bale of cotton...containing a gorgeous Faillienese textile sample dated a hundred years back.

But the cream of his collection was already aboard. That one crate, the one he'd gone to great lengths to procure...

...well, that was something special. He'd procured it at great intrigue and masterminded this whole operation to keep it out of harm's way. It rested in the cool darkness below deck, secured to a shipping pallet weighted with iron cannonballs to keep it from rolling about. A squat man-sized ceramic vase, packed in cotton, perhaps worth even more than that idiotic talking sword he fenced to Wulfschein a month ago. He'd heard tell that it could infuse water with bright koi fish, or turn anything into a flawless compass that never lost its charge, or some such. He didn't believe it, but certain buyers were very interested.

"Bevel," he finished, going back to supervising, "some days it's good to be a mastermind."

[Ryudo]

Ryudo continued to walk towards the dock, when he heard a peculiar noise, to the ordinary ear it would have nearly been inaudible, but do to the very high possibility that Ryudo could be ambushed he had his sense trained and on duty. It sounded merely like a simple splash, innocuous at the surface, but when Ryudo pieced together the sound with where he was located, he realized what had happened, someone has fallen in!

Ryudo rushed to the sound of the splash and looked over the dock, at first he saw nothing but the cool black ocean beneath him, but then he saw it, more like her. She was swimming along the surface, albeit crudely, towards the boat. Ordinarily Ryudo would have left it at that, but her flailing motions worried him. It would be very ungentlemanly to simply leave her there to drown. Ryudo decided to call out to her,

“Miss, are you alright?” Ryudo tried not to draw to much attention, just hers, but he was afraid that he might not have said it loud enough. He could only hope that she heard him.

[Jade Margery]

Jade thought she was doing rather nicely, all things considered. She had almost made it to the boat without any of the smugglers noticing her, and though she felt so cold she had to clench her teeth together to keep them from chattering, she was actually swimming pretty well. Doggy style, maybe, but she was getting there. She'd heard somewhere that cold water was easier to float in than warm. Jade had never done any extensive testing of that statement, but it gave her some confidence now.

A careless deckhand had left a rope trailing off the stern, for which Jade counted her lucky stars (and she had a lot of them). She was about four feet from it when a voice called out, unmistakeably addressing her. Jade winced and twisted around a bit to see a man (another elf?!) with a long sword, standing on the dock near the ship. He didn't look like he belonged with the crew, whom she could hear making ready to sail. Was he just some nosy do-gooder? He would give her away! If Jade had had a wall in front of her at that moment, she probably would have banged her head into it a couple times in between some unsophisticated phrases. She didn't have a wall in front of her though. She had a rope, and if she was going to appease her curiosity, she had to get to it.

Ignoring the nosy bugger on the pier, she kicked hard for the last couple feet and grabbed the thick cord with both hands. It was tied fast to something up there, probably the slack from a knot that fell over board, and Jade pulled herself mostly out of the water and up it, shivering. She wasn't sure what she would do next, but for something she was making up as she went along, the adventure was going quite well by her usual standards.

[Bevel]

Gaah. Life has been obnoxious lately; I apologize for the insanely slow reply. I'll work on speeding it up in the future.

The problem with second-hand ships, or any sort of vehicles for that matter, is that the seller never actually gets around to detailing quite everything that's wrong with the barge in question. Catena had her fair share of problems that Bevel knew about, but he knew, in the deepest and most secure part of his belly, that there were a hell of a lot more.

This worried him.

One such flaw was a loose section of hull approximately five feet above the waterline. Impossible to spot from the inside and only barely visible from the right angle (below) on the outside, the portly drow had missed it on his many runs over the ship. A rusty set of hinges indicated that at one point or another, one of Catena's owners had had the insane idea to install an extra cannon there, purpose unknown. The artillery in question had long since vanished from its mounting, but the small hatch remained.

By luck or by skill, this was precisely what Jade Margery, rogue extraordinaire, had found herself hanging below.

Meanwhile, Bevel had barricaded himself in his "office," or rather, what passed for captain's quarters aboard the fair ship Catena. A trio of loaded flintlock pistols of varying calibers as well as a large blunderbuss were pointed directly at the door, within easy arm's reach, each primed to blow a rather large hole in any pirate that decided to saunter in trying to off the captain.

Bevel LeChaudiere Kessler was not a paranoid drow. He was a prepared one.

Once again he went over his shipping ledger, silently cursing the entire sailing profession. To be honest, he didn't know how anybody managed before powered ships came along. Mage power, oar power, steam power -his personal favorite- it all beat the sailcloth out of wind power. To rely on the wind was to cast your bets on whatever vengeful sea deity you chose to worship -- didn't matter which, as he'd never heard of a sea deity that wasn't vengeful and capricious -- and put yourself in fate's hands.

Of course, Fate being the fickle bitch that she was, she'd screw you over a million and one ways before breakfast.

The millionth and millionth and first such ways, in case the gentle reader is wondering, were currently hanging out unbeknownst to Bevel off the port side cargo bay, in the form of Ryudo and Jade Margery.

[Ryudo]

Ryudo followed the woman as she was dragged by the boat, at first Ryudo though everything was in control, but then he thought he saw her struggling. Ryudo could not let someone drown and sit idly, Ryudo continued to follow her down the peir. He watched her still being dragged by the boat, and Ryudo realized that he had to act. Ryduo ran ahead of the boat, that was moving quite slow at the moment, and stopped at a peir twenty feet ahead of it. In the blink of an eye he nimbly dove off the peir and into the cool water. With a minimal splash and almost no noise Ryudo saw towards the oncoming boat.

As Ryudo swam he wondered just exactly what he was doing. Had he ever me this woman before? Was there any money involved? Ryudo decided these questions were irrelevant, she was in need of assistance and Ryudo hoped he would be able to provide it. If indeed he did help her, perhaps she may have some information that he needed.

Ryudo let the boat pass him slightly before he caught up to the woman, Ryudo grapped a line dangling above him, and held on. It was moments like this that made Ryudo wish he had practiced some heroic speech.

"Hello Miss, my name is Ryudo, and I'm here to*Splash*" A large wave hit the boat that Ryudo was holding onto, he struggled to hold the line above him.

[Jade Margery]

Looking up, Jade could see an outline against the hull of the ship--a small hatch, secured but not securely. If she could shimmy up the rope a little further, she might be able to open it... might be able to get inside! With renewed fervor she curled her numbed feet around the line and tugged herself upwards. It was not as easy a task as it appeared--her hands were soon burning despite the chill, and she was constantly getting sprayed with cold water every time the ship hit a wave. At least, being one who generally spent her time getting into places that she wasn't supposed to, the exercise of rope-climbing in and of itself was not a new experience.

Then the line went taught without warning. Jade clung like a limpet, afraid that it had caught on something, but glancing down she could see that in fact, something had caught on it. The man from the pier. The one who thought she was drowning or something. He was saying something, introducing himself, but the crashing roar of the sea made him difficult to hear even before he got a mouthful of wave. As he appeared to be both chivalrous and dense, Jade mentally christened him 'Sir Thickhead' until such a point as they might be better acquainted.

The ship was gathering speed as it escaped the docks--too far now for either of them to swim, especially Sir Thickhead as he seemed to still be wearing all of his clothes. Jade waved a hand at him to get his attention, then jabbed her finger towards the closed hatch and hoped he understood to follow. She didn't want anyone to get drowned trying to rescue her, especially when she didn't need rescuing.

A few more moments of climbing brought her level with the opening. She wrapped one arm securely around the rope and then stretched out to cut the cord holding the door shut with one of her daggers. It fell open easily. Jade replaced her knife and climbed eagerly aboard into the musty darkness of the lower deck. Crates and barrels surrounded her in the small space, leaving little room to move between them, though more than she expected. There was no one down there at the moment.

Jade braced herself on the edge of the opening and grabbed the rope to pull it as close to the hatch as she could, so that Sir Thickhead would have an easier time of getting into it.

((No offense meant, Ryudo. Jade isn't very nice really))