The crew of the Lovelace, and her Rho visitant, gathered in the mess hall for a briefing on their job. Elander, shoulder haunched like a cat in the reeds, leaned in at the head of the table, presenting a PDA with their targets pictures, their Mr. X’s business card sitting right next to it. Ierx had left a greasy fingerprint on it when he tried to read its text.
The messhall lived up to its name. Most of the furnishings were things they’d seen on the side of the road while rolling in the Jingle Horse and reasoned were half-decent and half-clean. Chairs of three different types of wood, in Rho, Nadir and even Saurian styles. Some were comfortable -- Elanders for example, a lovely Saurain armchair of sandwood -- others were bony, awful things that poked their occupants’ rears with warped bulbs of metal or plastic. And no number of the ugly blankets laid on the seats and backs ever made them easier to rest in.
Saori languished in one such chair, her face and body stiff and as regal as one could be in an ill made chair. Her long, flowing dress brushing against the floor below in dire need of a sweeping. Elander gave her a harsh glare before addressing his second and then the rest of the crew.
“Like I said on the channel, this is a nice and easy search and rescue. EastFed merchant’s daughter has gone missing three days now. Young girl by the name of Ayelet Sonrimor.”
“She’s cute,” Slick interjected in her groggy, emotionless tone.
“We’re going to find her to get paid. Reality is we’re coming up on this 72 hours late, longer the marks are missing higher chance of them being corpses. This guy seems very set on the idea of her being alive. Speed is going to be our friend here if we want to make his wish a reality.”
“You think he won’t pay if she turns up dead?” Antares asks, voice trilling quizzically.
“I’m getting that feeling,” Clovehitch affirms. “We got some leads. Father says the girl’s got a boyfriend in the Anarchs, who have a chapter in the Underrail if I am not mistaken. We can also get access to that academy’s dorms with some finesse, might give us some other leads. Problem is the academy is in the Upper City, and only I’ve got an identification pass for it.”
“Ah, Honorable Captain Clovehitch, may I make a proposal?”
“What’s that, Saori?”
“I will be picked up to meet with one of my clients in less than an hour. The vehicle will take me anywhere I’d like to go within the upper city no questions asked as long as I arrive on time. And further, I could easily get you in touch with a contact of mine in the Upper City FetClubs.”
“Why would I want that?”
“They have tabs on all sorts of people. Wouldn’t it be valuable to know more about your Mr. X? How many times have you gotten into a job and suffered because of details your client didn’t inform you about? Perhaps he has enemies that might have snatched his daughter?”
Clovehitch considered this for a second, and as painful as it was to him, he admitted it was a strong point and accepted.
“I would like to be cut in on the job. Say, a half-share for my help?”
Clovehitch huffed. “Everyone alright with that?”
“No,” Ierx said. Imogen gave him a glance and he relented.
“Half-share for Saori for the information and cracking us into the Upper City without any trouble. Myself, Imogen and Ierx will go to the club Saori recommends. Antares and Slick you’re breaking into the academy.”
“Breaking in? Captain, I am not a ‘break-and-enter’ type of Starling, you know?”
“I am aware that the fall from the top of the academy’s fence could well break both your legs and several of your ribs. Being hollow and all.”
“Exactly. Mine is a gentle, delicate race. Too tender for the dangerous parts of life. I can stay here, in the cockpit, with my oxygen tanks.”
“Alright. Slick will go alone and get your share.”
Antares’ head whipped between Slick and Clovehitch, feathers fluffing out and vibrating with a ruffle from spine to elbow, a loose one coming off and settling on Imogen’s shoulder. “Whoa, captain, don’t get crazy now. I have been known to break and enter into a few places.” He clicked his beak together and let out a small pishing sound.
“Objective is to collect anything that might be a lead. Toss her dorm room, maybe canvas some students if you can. Don’t make too much of a scene and by god don’t get pinched.”
Slick and Antares nodded and began muttering about how’d they’d get into the academy.
“For us,” Clovehitch said, circling his finger around Imogen, Ierx and himself, “no big guns in the Upper City. Holdouts if you want but nothing serious.”
Saori got up and excused herself, daintily bowing and retreating to her cabin.
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Antares and Slick slipped from Saori’s ride to the mist-drenched streets of the Upper City. The school zone was almost entirely empty, so as the two turned their heads left and right they saw nothing but well kept street lamps and Saori’s vehicle rolling off.
The Starling looked himself up and down and then Slick. He’d borrowed one of her boiler suits for his disguise. Not only was it nearly a foot too long and way too loose, it smelled like wet oily fur and deathsticks. He’d rolled the sleeves and pant legs up to an acceptable length, cuffed them off, and tried to bend his collar over the stitched on name tag that read “Slick-With-Oil.”
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“I know what I’ll be doing after this,” Antares said before heading them off, leading them around the academy’s gates to scope out back entrances.
“What’s that?” Slick asked, ears perked up straight and forward, the untrimmed little whiskery hairs hanging low from their pink insides.
“A nice warm bath,” Antares choked on his last words and wheezed, holding his beak shut with one talon and trying to suppress a coughing fit. “So what’s the bet, this girl cold and in need of a visit to an incinerator or are we actually gonna find a living, breathing mark this time?”
“Said it yourself, statistically likely she is dead.” Slick’s droll, detached voice was a perfect fit for her expressionless face. She bared her teeth in a yawn, unflinching green eyes scanning the gate’s side entrance for handholds to climb.
“So, want to bet on it?”
“Nope.”
Antares wheezed again and leaned against the gate, crossing his arms.
In her monotone voice, Slick jabbed at her partner, “Why did the Captain put the Starling with the pulmonary cachexia on the stealth mission?”
Antares wheezed in reply and smiled. He glanced across the academy’s field. The prim and proper steps of pavement, well-tended and ordered rows of bushes and thin spindly trees were making his vision blur with their generic and samey quality.
“See anyone?” She asked, kneeling to jingle at the gates lock with her picking tools.
“Not a soul. Just a lot of soullessly organized bushes.”
“At least your eyes haven’t fallen apart. Yet.”
“And my sense of wit and humor,” he added merrily, poking her with his beak.
She gave him an empty expression, her slit pupils wide in the dark, low-light environment, their reflective nature giving Antares the spooks. “I’m not so sure.”
Antares let out a rattly breath, tested a bar of the gate with his digits and beak. He grabbed it with both hands, hoisted up, and grabbed the length of bar under him with his digitigrade feet and painfully climbed up the two meter fence.
On the other end he collapsed to the damp grass, sucking in and expelling air in awful sounding gasps. Slick, unsympathetic, poked him with a lockpick until he stood up again and unlatched the door from his end.
“My bones… hurt…” Antares said between huffs. He rubbed his elbows, fluffing out the tufts of feathers that ran from them. Twinges of pain jolted up the joints in his wrist and elbow. Each step sprang a dull throb deep inside his knees.
“Your bones always hurt,” Slick replied as she slunked along the stone path to the dorms. Antares thought she was the very picture of a perfect janitor: empty looking with a vague sense of anger and a creepy posture.
The door to the dorms was protected by a cheap maglock Slick shorted in a few seconds. The two of them turned their heads up and waited for an alarm but didn’t hear a peep.
“Ah, I bet this building has a silent alarm!” Antares said joyfully.
Slick slunk along the carpeted halls, moving even more quiet than normal. The only sound heard in the poorly lit dormitory was the occasional rasp and click of Antares’ beak.
“I’m impressed by the architecture. Looks like an old timey Duskling academy.”
He ran his digits over the divots in the wooden walls. The dark wood marked with geometric slits in all manners of mathematical design.
“Visit many of these?”
“Oh,” Antares took a rattly breath, “stalking the halls of all-female academies and flying A60M-Zero fighter jets was all I did in my youth.” His last words said with a breathless quiet tone.
“Make any go missing?”
“No, but plenty ran away from me. Must not like being pecked.”
Slick scanned a roster on the wall, “What’s the mark’s name again?”
“One Sonrimor, Ayelet.”
“Got ‘er,” Slick duly replied, tapping the case with a claw, careful not to press the pad to the glass and leaving prints.
“Let’s go clean up her room. Empty wastebaskets, make her bed. Raid her drawers,” Antares feathers ticked up in a smile.
The two ‘janitors’ slunk through the dead-silent halls and up two flights of carpeted stairs that left Antares in a bitter wheezing fit. The upper floors were thin rows of doors that ran the length of west and east wings.
“Well behaved girls, not a peep,” Antares said, taking a huff from an oxygen pump. Slick lead him to the second floor’s east wing, to dorm 211. The door was adorned with a name plate reading ‘Ayelet S.”
Slick cracked open the maglock even easier than the front door. She didn’t even let out a deadened groan when the door creaked open. Antares pushed the door open and slid in around Slick.
A single small slit of a window provided a dim glow from the street lights outside. The furniture in the dorm was cheap looking and bland compared to the ornate halls and wooden features and fixtures of the rest of the dorm. To Antares’ excellent eyes the room looked lived in, sheets tossed aside on the bed, possessions left lying around. Antares took a pen in his hand and wrote on a piece of paper with it.
“Not bad,” he mumbled to himself, slipping it into his pocket. Slick grunted to get his attention and he spun on his hallux. Slick had a pair of Sonrimor’s underwear stretched out across her waist, mocking wearing them with a straight face. Antares shook his head to show his disapproval that the small pink things would suit Slick’s furry body.
Slick continued to toss her wardrobe. Antares flipped her bed inside out, finding nothing. The desk was a wash aside from a PDA.
“Worth anything?” Antares asked the mechanic, turning it over in his hand. Looked like a cheap model, emblazoned with the emblem of the academy and some words in Duskling.
“How should I know? Hold onto it, we can crack it once we’re out of here.”
Antares shrugged and slipped it into his boiler suit’s front pocket, weighing the loose clothes uncomfortably low on his frame.
“The father may have been right,” Slick said, bending over and grabbing something from the floor. It was a printed photograph of the mark, and another Duskling boy, in a black shirt and slacks. The boy had his arm around Sonrimor, who looked bashful.
“The boyfriend?”
“Yes. And that type of clothing is usually what Anarch members wear.”
“It isn’t proof that they ran away together, but it at least proves he’s an element.”
“You searched everything else?”
“Pretty much. Unless the Captain wants some geometry notes or a new cardigan I think we got everything of value.”
The two faux-janitors left the dormitory without issue, leaving the facility in a less clean state than they found it.