D&D 5E Hold Back The Night [IC]

[SECTION]"Sector fourteen? Yes, excellent dung briquets, if my memory serves me," muses Fitz with the hollow bearing of someone possessed of few, if any, social graces. "Why if it wasn't for the factories...well, that's neither here nor there is it? What matters is saltpeter... or some sulfur and phosphorus... a bit of potash?" Frowning at not finding the ingredients he's looking for, Fitz clambers atop a crate to peer at the upper shelves, sniffing the air intently. "How can Rashimi call this a proper pantry? Not even a whiff of alchemist's fire or acid. Hmm, she must at least have rat poison somewhere?"

Fitz begins haphazardly shuffling things about on the shelf, making more noise than he should, even if he's attempting to be discrete about it; he is, after all, just a little gnome. He suspects the bottle might be there, the one Rána confiscated from him, sparing him from doing something he'd regret. Rána and Rashimi seemed close. Then again, the elf may have just spilled it out in an alley. "Rat poison works on hobgoblins, doesn't it?" He whispers over his shoulder of the nearest person to him.[/SECTION]

Lorelei briefly caught the eye of the panicked woman Rashimi over the Captain's shoulder, she could see terror residing there like she never had before. Understanding there must be a great need here, she formulated a quick plan.

She went to the table where the Captain had been sitting, poured herself a drink, then refreshed his. She brought his drink over to him and offered it.

She spoke slowly and clearly, still calm, hopefully giving anyone all the time they needed to do... something.

"It seems you may have found a traitor in our midst, Captain? It seems every so often one of these villains finds their way into our sanctuary, our reprieve from daily life. I don't know why they believe they can come here and use us this way, it is quite disheartening."

Lorelei took a long drink from her glass, she needed this drink and more after this night.

"I believe even our most Revered Ordinator will be quite disheartened."

She timed a sigh, then a long pause to let that sit in.

"When Absalom comes to my bed," she stopped suddenly to look the Captain in the eyes, "Oh, you do know that, do you not? He visits me in this very place Captain! When he comes to my bed here, he tells me how happy he is with me."

Well, that's not a lie, she thinks, though he'd probably take me in a garbage bin and doesn't give a rat's tail about this place...

"He tells me how happy he is and I imagine that he'd be very UNHAPPY to find out something bad had happened to his favorite place in the whole world."

Lorelei took another sip and started slowly pacing around the wooden floor, trying to give a reassuring smile to a frightened customer every once in a while.

Lorelei tapped on her full lips. "Hhmmmmm. Captain Okten. Your name does sound familiar to me. Yes, I think just recently Absalom was telling me about you, this Captain under his command. I believe it was you." She stopped there, not offering if what she heard was good or bad.

"What can I do to help root out this traitor? Obviously we can't have someone in here ruining one of His Excellence Ordinator Absalom's favorite places in the world, now can we?"

"So why don't you let me help you, and help my very dear, dear friend Ordinator Absalom, and let's go looking for this traitor you seek in some of the little hidey holes I know about. Places maybe your men wouldn't think to look."


OOC: IF Rashimi is still there, Lei will look to her to get a subtle signal as to which direction to go, up or down. She's specifically looking for eye motion.


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"Rat poison is just poison," came a sour voice from nearby the gnome. "You'll just need more of it than you would for a rat. A lot more. Hobs have sturdy guts for goblins."

He paused, studying Fitz, then says, "Of course, if you want to poison them you may as well just go back up there and murder a few with a knife or something. Anyone would know where and how they were poisoned with something as simple as rat poison."

The boy was lounging there, his too-big staff tucked between his arm and his chest, glaring around at everyone as if this mess were somehow their fault. He must have scrambled in quickly before it was closed up.

~ The Cellar ~

"If ye're not going to come up with any solutions yerself, t'ere is no point in copping an attitude over somebody else's," Rána chided the recalcitrant youth. "All ideas are welcome ones."

At Derngar's direction, she moved away from Hashlan with a lingering look of sympathy in order to guide her hands along the shelves of bottles, searching for the latch or seam that would reveal the doorway. The stonework here looked older than The Rose, indicating that this channel had existed before the tavern had. The shelves hid that inconsistency.

"Maybe a distraction of some sort..." Rána uttered softly to herself. "Somet'ing t'at won't arouse suspicion." Even if they were able to avoid a fight and send the hobgoblin on some other chase, it would only be a temporary reprieve. One way or another, the elf was fully aware that their time at the Rose was at its end, for herself and for anyone even loosely connected to the rebels, here. ~

"On the contrary," the boy countered. "All ideas must be subject to criticism. Welcome they may be, but equal they are not."

He scowled and scratched irritably at his bare chin.

"A distraction could work, but it would have to be a sacrifice, or an illusion."

The Cellar
[section] Hashlan's cat-like eyes looked deep into Derngar's, the little Halfling feeling a measure of confidence seeping into his posture as the bold human brought himself down to Hashlan's perspective. He wondered if Derngar would be so brave if this was where his eyes sat: low, always in shadow, always dwarfed by those around him. The Halfling remembered that once, his grandfather had told him that his people were great warriors themselves … but surely the man was just old and confused. That couldn't be true.

” Trust you. Yes. Yes, I do,” Hashlan affirmed, clearing his throat quietly, ” Silas is like you. Human. Old, though, very old it seems. Salted hair and sad. A Courier, he brought a package here. Keeps it in some tube of metal. He did not give it to anyone, I don't think. Showed it to Rashimi once. Told it to the man who was taken. Said to Rashimi that he was looking for something here: he stays in the basement level, down the hall to the left, go right, three doors down on the left. Reads a strange book when I bring him food. Pays with proper golden Towers, not the Wands the rest do.”

Rána easily finds that the way out is actually built into the wall: a circle that, once reached into, has a horizontal handle. A clockwise twist of it elicits a muted *thunk*, a segment of the wall giving way and swinging inwards freely.

Fitz's ransacking of the shelves turns up little aside from alcohol and bottled water. Some of it looks like it's from ages ago, while others clearly bear the seal of Sector Seven, where foodstuff is produced in abundance. There also appears to be a few bottles of some type of oil: a quick investigation reveals them to be made from rapeseed.[/section]

Main Floor
[section] Okten tried not to give anything away from his solid face, but the way he chewed on his lower lip was enough to show that the idea that Ordinator Absalom could show up at any minute to spend time with this girl was enough to unnerve the Hobgoblin. To commit some offense that the Ordinator saw, real or imagined, would be enough to have his head cleaved from his neck. Or worse.

Okten had heard of terrible things that had befallen those who lived Absalom's tremendous wrath. That this … this Half-blood was somehow still alive after spending such … close time with Absalom either showed that he cared a great deal for her, or that she had somehow bewitched the Ordinator. But the latter made no sense to Okten: though 'passionate' at his pursuit of Justice, Absalom was nothing is not stoic. The girl could not have had a hold over him, but he valued the girl. For all Okten could do, he could not lay one finger on Lorelei: she was, for lack of better terms, invincible where the Hob's authority was regarded.

But that didn't mean he could not use her. She offered her assistance, and if she helped them in their search, surely it would keep the rest of these folks in line. Okten cracked a small, broken smile at the Half-Elf, sipping slowly from the drink she had handed him while nodding.

” An excellent suggestion, Songbird,” he growled, his title for her having just a bit more bite on his tongue than before, ” A model of loyalty. Would that all of your kind could learn from your example, which I am sure you will undoubtedly prove today. One way or another.”

The implication was clear: if she did not produce results, Okten would be all too happy to nail her to a cross for this clear challenge to his power.

” Go with my men. They will keep a close eye on you, however, and I must remind you that they are not His Eminence.”

While Absalom may have been fond of Lorelei, Okten was not. With a small nod to his men, they had their orders: if Lorelei stepped out of line, then the Captain would find a way to explain to The Ordinator that she had had … an accident, in some secluded place of this whorehouse. This was such a dangerous Sector, after all.

As Okten gave the signal to his own, Rashimi was signaling Lorelei herself: her eyes flitted to the floor again and again, her hands wringing together nervously.[/section]

[SECTION]The boy, of course, was right. Fitz's impulse was rarely towards a well devised deceit. Try as he might to pose and posture, much like the hobgoblin Okren, his mind did not work in the same way as the Mages of the Towers. "Hmph," he grumbles, quite surprised that a boy so young should be just as curmudgeonly as he, a withered rock gnome. "Rat poison would be too easy to track, I suppose... What have we here? Rapaseed? Hmm..." Fitz dwelled on the uses he might devise for the cooking oil, lubrication for gears, fuel for a small clockwork toy, grease for the stairs down into the cellar.

"Hmph, as much as it pains me. You're both right," says Fitz decisively, his breeches pulling up to reveal knobby ankles as he stands on the barrel, jar of rapeseed oil in hand. "We do need a distraction. And not all ideas have equal merit and thus should be measured." Scrambling down, he looks from the jar of oil to the stairs and then to the passage that Rána has discovered.

"Hmm..." he muses listening to the halfling Hashlan. "Sounds like Rashimi keeps a wizard in her basement."

"Sooner or later, that hobbled goblin will send his thugs down to search the cellars. We can orchestrate what they'll expect - someone trying to sneak away. I have a spell, one their commander will surely recognize from working for the Towers, that releases a magical alarm when a creature crosses a threshold of my devising. I could lay this spell upon that hidden door, and we leave it cracked open. The will assume their culprit has fled the Rose." Fitz scratches his head, realizing that taking the oil would amount to thievery from Rashimi, and sighs, placing it back on the shelf. "Of course, we'd need to find a good hiding place to wait them out... Maybe you know one Hashlan? Or this wizard-in-the-basement might?"[/SECTION]

[SECTION]Muttering under his breath as he was wont to do, Fitz hid the way he communed with his fruit bat familiar, hidden in the rafters of the main floor of the Rose. Telepathically: "Squomble, Squomble, you scurrilous bat, show me where Lorelei is at. Take care not to be seen or heard, if'n you are fly fly away like a bird."[/SECTION]

"Haslan, is there another exit from here?" Derngar asks.

"Rana, take the gnome, and Terry, no, no uh, Teryn, go down the hall and get the courier. It must but who the Hob is after. If he finds him, the Rose will be torched I am sure. I will stay here to make sure they don't come down the trapdoor. Go quietly. now." Derngar turns to the kid. "Kid, get up there and see if we can't bolt or lock that trapdoor from this side"