The silver bell over the entrance to The Friendly Fiend rattled cheerfully as the door swung open and Toras and Fyrehowl stepped into the quaint little shop.
“I’m fresh out of spare yugoloth blood I’m afraid to say.” A’kin chuckled from behind the counter with a cheerful gleam in his eyes. “I assume by your expressions that everything worked out well with that other little affair?”
“Eh…” Toras shrugged. “About as well as it could have. But that’s not why I’m here.”
“Well it’s a shame that it didn’t go better for you Toras.” A’kin softly and sympathetically frowned, his whiskers drooping for a moment before he gestured with a hand and the feather-duster it held. “But come in, come in, you and Fyrehowl both. I have to at least make an effort to be a shrewd businessman while we otherwise sit and gab for as long as you’d like.”
Toras and Fyrehowl stepped inside the shop as A’kin smiled cheerfully, even as he continued to dust the shelves. The shelves didn’t particularly need it, but the act itself was quaint and charming in its own right, and distinctly at odds with the fact that both of them were alone with a smiling yugoloth.
“This is all related to that crap involving the Sigil Advisory Council meeting and us pissing off a certain someone that you and I both know.” Toras rolled his eyes. “And by us, I mean Florian and Fyrehowl.”
Glancing at a collection of chocolates molded to resemble the upper tier members of Queen Morwel’s eladrin Court of Stars, Fyrehowl stuck out her tongue.
A’kin tilted his head, “Well it’s funny that you mention that Toras, because I had something related come up recently. It all began with a little issue outside of my shop yesterday, when one Stavros Garianis was stabbed to death by a gang of thugs being watched over by a particularly well-dressed tiefling of the groomer-guard variety. Ugly business that. Ugly, ugly…” The ‘loth shook his head sorrowfully. “It took me an hour to clean the blood off of the windows. It’s just the latest in a string of incidents though. The Athar and their lot have been at each others’ throats since that same Sigil Advisory Council meeting that you and I were at. It really was a shame, and paying attention to it all, it seems clear that the back and forth between them is just both groups feeling the other out in preparation of something larger.
A’kin shook his head a second time sorrowfully before brushing a pair of claws through the fur of his chin.
“Now I wouldn’t have paid any further attention to it all except for a second thing that occurred the same day just before closing when I was paid a visit by a gentleman who works in the Night Market and runs a business importing items from Gehenna. Well he came here to throw gold at me for a specific item and also apparently to engage in gossip, both things of which I’m particularly fond of. He was here to purchase a sprig of Ysgardian mistletoe,” He held up a finger, “–the most jolly of abortifacients– since he was rather upset that he’d gotten his mistress –not his wife– pregnant, and well he happened to mention over a cup of hot chocolate that I’d made him that Garianis planned a groundbreaking five days from then, which is now tomorrow I suppose, at the former location of the Shattered Temple. In fact, he seemed rather insistent on that point. He repeated it five times in the space of so many minutes like he was deliberately trying to impress that point upon me.”
A’kin shrugged, “If he was going out of his way to feed me information, he could have simply told me before I made him cookies in an attempt to make him more talkative. I would have happily just taken the information and gossiped happily at a later point, just like I am now.”
“I’m not worth cookies?” Fyrehowl’s ears drooped and she mock frowned.
“I never said that now did I?” A’kin paused and held up a finger. Walking into the back room, he returned only seconds later carrying a tray of warm and obviously just baked cookies. “So here you go, and you as well Toras.”
Toras picked up a cookie as Fyrehowl enjoyed her own chocolate chip cookie baked into the shape of a dragon, its mouth oozing just a bit of dark chocolate as she bit into it.
“You baked these ahead of time.” The fighter pointed out. “Just for us, or do you keep a working bakery in the back just to hand out to customers?”
“Back to what I was saying though about the Shattered Temple.” A’kin’s eyes sparkled as he smiled, not actually answering the question. “We aren’t that far from there, and so understandably, I’ll be closing the shop early and making sure that the door is sufficiently barred. It does seem that nearly every instance of public violence in this part of the Lower Ward corresponds with looting attempts on my shop. Funny that.”
A’kin sighed and shrugged, both taking it all in stride with a nearly celestial patience, but clearly alluding to the responsible party –who was backing the Athar– without actually saying her name. “But I’m babbling on Toras, what was it that you were here to get?”
Having just swallowed a mouthful of chocolaty goodness a moment before with Cipher prescience, Fyrehowl was the first to speak, “We’re here to prevent an escalation game from going well past the point where a particular greater yugoloth…”
Toras abruptly put a hand on the lupinal’s shoulder to stop her from explaining everything. “I need to buy the most expensive, most grotesquely, most stupidly pointless and ostentatious gift that I can possibly buy… for Shemeska the Marauder.”
“Pardon?” A’kin tilted his head to the side, “I must have heard you wrong.”
“Yes. Her.”
“…” A’kin made a face best described as a physical manifestation of dumbfounded confusion.
“Yeah… Yeah I know…” Toras sighed. “It’s the best way for this situation to go.”
A’kin squinted and adjusted his spectacles, “Hasn’t she tried to kill you on more than one occasion?”
“We figured that you might know what she liked, you know,” Toras hesitated a moment before he continued, “You being a ‘loth and all.”
“I’d hardly think to compare the two of us.” A’kin’s response was distinctly and deliberately quick. “But… I suppose that I can help you find something that might work.”
Toras and Fyrehowl smiled as A’kin motioned them towards the curtain leading to his back room.
“Nothing in the front here likely matches the sort of things that she seems to appreciate.” A’kin pushed aside the curtain. “And by that, I mean nothing in the front room is hideously expensive.”
“You know, come to think of it, I’ve never actually seen your stock room back here.” Toras remarked as they followed the fiend.
One step through the doorway Fyrehowl paused as the fur on the back of her neck prickled. She stepped back out, then back through to confirm her suspicions: it wasn’t just a curtain over a doorway leading into a stock room: it was a portal.
The storage room was huge, easily four times the size of the rest of the shop itself. At the distant rear of the cavernous chamber a spiral stairwell extended up and down to presumably other floors or rooms. Fyrehowl tried to collect her bearings but without magic she hadn’t a clue if they were still in Sigil, some manner of demiplane, or wherever else.
“This…” The lupinal paused, searching for the words. “This isn’t what I expected back here. I’m impressed.”
“Most people don’t ever come back here.” A’kin shrugged and smiled. “Nisha helped herself into here once or twice, but she doesn’t know all of the portal keys. That’s probably for the best.”
Rows and rows of shelves, book cases, boxes, barrels, and chests filled the chamber. Random objects from a hundred different worlds and planes cluttered the shelves and fought for space in a chaotic jumble of bric-a-brac of which A’kin’s public shop space was simply a microcosm.
Starry-eyed and still taking in the sheer size of A’kin’s shop, still with cookies in hand, Toras and Fyrehowl followed along like puppies as the cheerful ‘loth led them from aisle to aisle, shelf to shelf, showing off dozens of grossly expensive and equally pointless items, all of them with increasingly hefty price tags. Jewelry, clothing, rare bottles of alcohol, all of them Toras passed up as oddly enough, not being expensive enough.
“What’s the most stupid and stupidly expensive thing that you can sell me right now on short notice?” Toras glanced at a bustier studded with rubies and emeralds before turning back to A’kin, having already discarded that option as probably sending the wrong signal. There was a distinct line between bribery and flirtation that he didn’t wish to cross.
A’kin paused and thought for a moment before leading them to a large glass tank as tall as Toras and twice again as wide. Inside of its frozen oceanic diorama, a giant clam rested on a bed of coins and coral. A grapefruit sized pearl rested inside of the clam’s depths along with the skeletal leg of a long dead would-be pearl diver.
“Gods above that’s tacky,” Fyrehowl smirked and stuck out her tongue. “Where do you even get stuff like this A’kin?”
The fiend smiled only his contagious smile and didn’t answer.
“How much?” Toras asked without a care in the world.
“Well, it’s certainly expensive, eighty thousand gold actually.” A’kin scratched his chin with a well manicured claw before giving a frown and tracing his other hand in the air around the outline of the gaping giant clam. “Perhaps it wouldn’t have the desired statement you’re hoping for. With what it is and all, you could read into it a bit too much perhaps. That wouldn’t be good.”
“Oh.” Fyrehowl snickered at the smiling fiend’s insinuation. “Yeah…”
“And Toras,” A’kin turned and put a hand on the half-celestial’s shoulder with a look of concern in his eyes, “I really don’t think you should spend this much. Believe me, you’d be paying my bills in a rather large way, but then again, I genuinely care for my customers and I don’t want to see you wasting your money on well, a girl who won’t return your feelings.”
“No! No no no!” Toras waved his hands as he blushed with more horror than embarrassment. “It’s not like that! I’m immune to disease and even I’m not going there!”
A’kin attempted to and failed to conceal a soft chuckle. “She’s a ‘loth Toras. She’s going to take your bribery as the closest thing to a love letter left upon her windowsill. Well, either that or a petty attempt to manipulate her and buy her off, which would likely earn most berks a knife in the back. She’s also likely to see it as a desperate attempt and she’ll just enjoy making you miserable. You really shouldn’t flirt with her. You’re better than that Toras and you deserve someone better than her.”
“Seriously A’kin, it isn’t like that.” The half-celestial’s face was flushed beet red. “That’s a horror story that I want absolutely no part of.”
“If you say so Toras.” A’kin shrugged with a faintly sorrowful expression on his face, as if he felt bad for the Marauder’s seemingly-to-him would-be paramour. “But of course, what would I know?”
“Wrench that horrible thought out of your mind A’kin, please.” Toras shuddered. “I’d rather throw her down the side of the spire than kiss her on the cheek, and I’m essentially going to be kissing her ass with this gift as it stands.”
“Please don’t use that phrase Toras.” Fyrehowl grimaced. “That’s not an image I want to think about.”
A’kin turned to the lupinal and then back to the half-celestial as they chattered back and forth about the very plausibility of bribing the Marauder. Toras won out in the end and turned back to A’kin, once again making it clear that he had no amorous intentions. A’kin seemed both amused and concerned, but willing to go along with making a massive amount of money nonetheless.
“Again, if you say so Toras.” The ‘loth waved his hands, “I won’t judge. I just worry about you is all.”
Fyrehowl burst out laughing as Toras did his best to convince A’kin that he wasn’t trying to bribe his way into Shemeska’s black, poisonous heart. As the two of them bantered, she glanced one shelf over at a number of dolls similar to those in the Jammer that they’d purchased from A’kin previously. Most of them seemed half-completed, but one in the exaggerated imitation of Jeremo the Natterer sat ready for sale.
“How much is this one A’kin?” Fyrehowl held the Jeremo doll up in the air when it decided on its own to animate.
“Did I hear someone mention the Marauder?” Dancing around on the shelf and grinning, the doll’s crown threatened to fall off of his mop of fussy blond felted hair. It glanced down at Fyrehowl and Toras and wiggled its eyebrows, “I heard that her former significant other in crime and in bed, Mantello the Jeweler, was still alive. Oh did he have some things to say about her! I hope she hasn’t pined away her nights without him! Rowr!”
A’kin shot Fyrehowl and Toras a look of utter mortification, “Ok no, definitely not that one either. How about some simpler jewelry or perhaps yet another mirror? Nothing that will get me shanked in an alleyway by association with the gift. It’s also probably best if you don’t tell her that you bought it from me.”
The browsing continued for another hour before Toras finally left with something befitting the Marauder. He also left with considerably less jink than he’d started the day with.
****
“Aaaaand, it’s sent.” Toras breathed a sigh of relief as he stared at the receipt for delivery of both his purchased bribe and the letter of apology on Fyrehowl and Florian’s behalf. The bribe itself was a wine decanter crafted from dozens of hen-egg sized sapphires and diamonds, held together with a wire matrix of gold and platinum. A century old bottle of wine had been thrown in for free, with the promise that ‘if it turns out to be corked or gone to vinegar, I’ll pay for the resurrection’ on A’kin’s behalf.
And so the fighter sat nursing a substantially less time-matured drink of his own, waiting to hear something, anything really, in response. In total, it took less than an hour, and came in a form that he hadn’t expected.
“What are you… please don’t kill me!!” Toras’s messenger and deliveryman arrived in the middle of the Portal Jammer’s taproom with a burst of light and a scream. He covered his face with both hands, ineffectually warding off a death spell that had never arrived, and in the fading light of the forced teleportation back to where he’d begun his journey, he looked up with a sense of slowly fading terror.
Both the bribe and the apology letter were still on the deliveryman’s person.
“Well that could have gone better than it did…” Toras sighed and gestured for an explanation from the man. “What did she say?”
“She snarled and sent me back.” The courier frowned apologetically. “I only said who I was and who I was delivering for before she started casting spells.”
“Nothing else?”
“Nothing else.”
Something else did arrive however a dozen seconds later when a second flicker-flash of a teleportation spell’s light heralded the arrival of a tiny floating pseudo-yugoloth, a nalg. The tiny fox-headed familiar with an imp-like scorpion’s tail floated in the air, drifting weightlessly.
“How may I help you?” Toras put on a smile that he didn’t mean at all and nodded to the fiendling, the same nalg that unbeknownst to him was currently tethered to the soul of one Rammander the Wise, serving as both the wizard’s familiar and the Marauder’s not entirely metaphorical leash upon her latest would-be protégé. A coveted status, it rarely seemed to end well for any of them.
“I bring a message for you from my master’s Mistress, the King of the Crosstrade.”
“Did she appreciate my gift?”
The nalg ever so briefly smirked as it turned its eyes to glance at the courier still holding that same gift. The gesture was swift, but clearly not just incidental. The slight was there and deliberate.
“The King of the Crosstrade says to tell you that you have legs of your own, and to use them.”
Toras sighed. “If you’ll allow me a moment, I’ll need to get myself dressed appropriately to meet her, assuming that she’ll grant me an audience?”
The nalg flashed a sanctimonious grin, “Please do so. In fact, Shemeska requests your presence at her table this evening. Bring yourself and whatever you desired to send her before, but this time, please do deliver it in person for her reception.”
Toras smiled, though inwardly the only thought running through his head was a profound, “F*CK!”
****