Lady Blood Claw looked at Corvayne and the bits of her skin showing rippled orange with irritation. Much like the orange chicken skewers that he and Grunt were eating.
He swallowed a bite and offered an untouched skewer to her, speaking loudly to be heard over the din of hundreds of other people talking. “You want one LBC?”
She pulled her flu mask down and gasped fresh air. “No! We've been walking around in circles for an hour. I geared up for a fight... not to watch you two pig out!”
They were standing in a rare open patch of damp concrete outside the flow of people shopping at the street market. Corvayne had been worried they would stand out, but a lot of people openly carried knives and guns. He had settled for a sidearm and a fire-breathing dagger, with his spear and other weapons stored in his ring. He admitted to himself he felt naked without the heft of his spear and kept patting his back expecting it to be there. The only thing that stopped him from doing it again after Lady Blood Claw yelled was that he was still holding skewers. It wasn't practical even if it wasn't a dead give away to anyone looking for him, as his spear would get caught on everything and everyone however he held it.
Moving through the market involved letting people push you against other people until you saw something you wanted and found a square foot of ground to stand on. Even without the crowd the environment felt constrained, a mix of damp weather and three story buildings on both sides with tracks and a highway running overhead all added to the claustrophobia. The neon lit signs lit everything in flickering lurid colors, mixing with some of the stalls flipping on multicolored lights to better show off their wares, bathing the darkly dressed crowd in rainbow halos. The smell of the sea mingled with scents of food mingled with hints of garbage filled dumpsters in back alleyways. His biggest shock of all was that, despite being in a dark cramped place with too many people, he was enjoying himself.
Corvayne wanted to join the shoppers and pick out parts for building something, as the market had stores that were just bins of old space ship leftovers. The only real shopping he had done, however, was dumping some of his gold to a guy strapped with guns who was buying precious metals. Three gold coins had net him nearly three thousand credits, and he now suspected that the first pawn shop he went to his previous life had ripped him off. Grunt, on the other hand, had been buying street food whenever he wandered by. Corvayne was impressed by both him and the vendors, managing to buy a sample of whatever in the time it took to shuffle past.
Lady Blood Claw had come to the market cloaked in the Watcher cloak she had found under his fake bed, with a pair of goggles, a loose long sleeved shirt with wrists meeting her gloves, a flimsy paper flu mask, and a bandana. Only someone looking very carefully or catching her when her mood changed might notice that she wasn't fully human. Corvayne watched her take a glove off and scratch at the straps holding all that skin obscuring gear on. If it was itchy it explained why she was in a foul mood.
Grunt made a few hand motions. Four fingers, tapping upper wrist held towards his face, shrug, mimed stuffing his face: We are waiting on our fourth person anyway, might as well eat, right?
Before Lady could say anything else, Grunt pulled out something that looked like a long helix of pastry with strawberry and chocolate filling. Lady Blood Claw looked at it and her visible skin turned white with rippling brown dots. She grabbed at it and Grunt pulled in back and gave her a smug look.
“Fine! I am hungry, and would like to try... that... Corvayne what kind of snack is that?”
He shrugged. “Sorry Miss Blood Claw, I don't know.”
Her skin turned orange for a moment. “Tch, I don't like that. Miss makes you sound like I'm your teacher.”
“Okay, since we are friends... do you like Lady as your informal address?” Corvayne was perplexed that she was still orange. Why was she annoyed?
“Lady is as much a first name as I have...” She said as she flickered back to light purple, a color that he wasn't quite sure of yet, before swapping to charcoal which was her serious or neutral or poker-face mood. “I consider you a friend as well. I don't mind how you address me except when it seems too formal.”
Grunt pointed between LBC and Corvayne, then made a motion bringing his arms in a loop like he was hugging someone, then mimed cradling someone by the back and head in his hands, leaning in to whisper in the person's ear, then turned and raised his eyebrows at them: She wants you to call her.... darling.
LBC turned violet and clenched her fists. “You shithead!”
Grunt laughed silently holding the snack ahead of him like a shield, which actually worked to stave off the large alien woman.
Corvayne spotted a pair of white furry boots moving through the legs of the crowd. “Ease up, Seru's coming back. Might be go time soon.”
Seru arrived at the open spot with one hand burdened with eight coffees from different places, the other held a large plastic bag with takeout containers.
LBC made a fist, visible skin turning red. “I cannot believe I stuck my neck out to vouch for her, and she got distracted by... by food!”
Grunt lowered the pastry in front of Lady Blood Claw and she grabbed it and started angrily chewing on it.
Seru set all her food down and huffed. “Okay, it cost me a hundred credits but I got where the Bone Dogs are! They live in the overflow tunnels under the city.” Seru had a smug look on her face. “You might not know it, but fifty years ago-”
Lady Blood Claw held up a hand, swallowing her pastry bite. “We know. Former colonization under the late emperor Nyxion Augustus. I have maps of the tunnels now.”
Seru's face turned grim. “Well, I know which entrances they use... it only cost me buying extra food from some vendors. But I GOT it! I told you, you guys need an info specialist, and I'm the best at it! I'm really really good at it, right?”
Corvayne nodded. “You did good, but don't overdo it. I don't want you to get in over your head.”
She brightened up at the comment. “Corvayne, you care?”
He pointed to his new eye while looking at her. He couldn't help but sound a little tired as he replied “If you get into trouble, I usually get hurt pulling you out.”
Grunt relieved her of the extra food. Lady Blood Claw took the coffee tray and started looking at each cup, settling on one that was practically coated in black marker for additions and radiated a cloyingly sweet smell.
Corvayne took a random coffee for himself. “Okay. Seru, I think for this you might want to stay on standby at Dawn's place... I don't know how dangerous the gang is going to be.”
“They mostly use knives and clubs with the enforcers packing guns, including assault rifles.” Seru said while offering coffee to Grunt, who grunted in thanks and popped the top off it, then drank the large coffee in a single gulp.
Lady Blood Claw frowned. “I should have brought the shield belt.”
“Oh yeah. The disappearances started about a week ago...” Seru had notes. “And the group that was seen being taken by the Bone Dogs were all nerds.”
Lady Blood Claw considered it, looking down with her chin on her hand as she mused, “Maybe they have some tech goal in mind?”
Seru shrugged. “The gang has a reputation as weird... the term someone used was 'walking cliché' but couldn't explain why. They also told me repeatedly to not go into any side streets alone.”
Seru walked with them away from the market streets, heading into brown and gray concrete apartments hidden in little walled blocks. Every flat surface at street level was covered in graffiti, some of it popping out from fresh coats of paint adding even more texture and strange colors to the walls of names written so large and bold they were impossible to understand.
They stepped out of the closed off streets to walk around larger old fashioned buildings, similar to the train station they had been at earlier in the day, all of them arrayed facing a section of raised park littered with plastic bags and take-out containers. A lone dog sized robot that looked like a white plastic beetle covered in spray paint looked to trying to collect all the garbage strewn across a block of grass. The path Seru lead them on kept going down the worn walkway between the grass to stairs down to a brick path along the river, rimmed with stonework and solid looking metal light poles, caked in soggy fliers and stickers. If not for all the broken glass scattered on the path, Corvayne might have fooled himself into thinking it was a nice place to walk. He could even look back and see both the bridge they crossed into Ko-Ban and the train station, it's clock tower light standing out in the shapes of old town and it's tangle of train tracks.
Seru guided them the other direction over to a small building built into the slope, no more then fifteen feet on a side with bronze bars over the windows.
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“You might have to break in, but this might let you skip the entrance everyone says they use... the big pipe a few blocks off the market street.”
Lady Blood Claw smiled. “Thank you Seru.”
The girl waved. “Good luck guys! Don't die!”
Grunt waved, then turned to the door and gently wiggled the handle, then yanked it open mangling part of the metal frame. He dusted his hands off and made a dainty pinching gesture with his three fingers up in the air, then cocked his wrist as if he was holding a tiny key and twisting it, then looked like he was bowling.
Lady Blood Claw tapped Corvayne on the shoulder. “Can you tell me what he's saying?”
“Oh, he's jokingly telling us 'make yourselves at home' with the careful unlocking thing and rolling out the red carpet.”
Lady Blood Claw held her chin up, curtsied, then drew her two handed sword and grasped the cloak, her form and skin shifting to match the dimly lit concrete stairs into the tunnels, suddenly moving with the smooth confidence of a predator in the dark.
Grunt held back a moment, and nudged Corvayne.
“She's my training partner. I'm not going to mess up a good thing.”
Grunt made a vacant face, held his fists to his hips and wiggled them, then started strutting about aimlessly while bobbing his head.
“I take offense at the suggestion I am any form of bird.” Corvayne responded.
LBC slipped from the shadows to grab their ears and drag them into the entrance to the flood tunnels, hissing at them, “Stop fucking around! We got a job to do!”
The same drainage system was very different in Ko-Ban. The smell of concrete and damp mixed with a hint of the ocean and a faint hint of something rotting. The more elegant graffiti of the city above morphed into crude drawings and runes, painted in white and yellow and red. Corvayne's boots were stained in clay that leaked through or washed in, and the concrete pipes and paths seemed more broken then the previous section.
Corvayne was sort of on edge getting into the first few tunnels, expecting a serious gun fight or something, but found nobody despite signs of being inhabited by the gang. Corvayne saw make shift homes in some of the larger tunnels, as well as crude drawings of sex acts and demons, piles of garbage heavily skewed to drinking and drug use, and gas lanterns with chairs. The tension he felt.
It was about ten minutes of careful stalking through the dimly lit tunnels that they saw the first two residents. Given the dog skulls on their heads, both with an extra hole hammered between the eyes, Corvayne felt it was safe to assume they were members of the Bone Dogs. They sat around a fire, prodding a can of beans with a stick. Something about their expressions were off, but Corvayne couldn't quite pin it down.
Corvayne was considering what to do with them when Grunt appeared from the dark behind them and struck their heads together, knocking them both out.
He did [Nerve Pinch] on the second group, dropping them around a burning barrel for a nap. All three still had the dog skulls on, and what looked like scavenged sports gear mixed with a lot of belts and bits of tire, often showing off ragged clothes. He wondered why anyone would join the gang if they didn't at least chip in for matching clothes, outside the dog skulls as hats thing.
After the third group, the intersection they arrived at had five gang members, three of which had guns and were clearly acting as sentries for a pipe that lead to a major open area.
Grunt tapped Corvayne and LBC on the shoulder, and made three fingers then with some gestures mimed sneaking behind the three guards with guns and knocking them out.
Two were standing on broken crates near a makeshift house and would be pretty easy to get behind, but one was in the middle of the pipe. Corvayne gestured to himself and the guard... he'd take that guy on once the others were dealt with. He held up two fingers.
The moment they crept from the entrance of the tunnel, all five members of the camp turned to face Lady Blood Claw, which surprised Corvayne because she was nearly impossible to spot with her multiple sources of camouflage in dim light. The unity they had when doing so was eerie.
“Get her for the ritual!” One shouted and pointed in exaggerated way, as if a first time actor was practicing for a bit part.
“Heh, I can smell her.” Another called out, slowly walking towards where LBC was crouched. The way all five seemed to perk up at once, and they all drew their weapons at the same time... the weird way they walked slowly forward... it all seemed very unnatural to Corvayne who was used to lightning fast predators. That and the taunting.
“Heh. What are you doing alone here, girl?”
“Rich kids shouldn't wander the bad parts of the city alone!”
He sprang into action once they had drifted past where he had frozen in place, leaping from the shadows and tapping a neck, causing the gang member to flop onto the ground with a thump.
Lady Blood Claw ducked under a gang member trying to grab her, slamming her fist into their gut twice. One of the ones with a gun raised it at her, which forced her to dash behind tent home. Grunt managed to grab the would-be shooter and use him to barrel over the other two remaining thugs. Grunt then gave everyone laying down a few punches to be sure.
Corvayne disarmed the prone forms, picking up a few extra guns for his storage ring. Why not? He looked around. They had avoided any shots fired. “Should we put on disguises?”
“I am not putting a dog skull on my head. No matter how much money Dawn is paying us.”
Grunt also pointed at the dog skull and shook his head, then mimed holding and petting something. Giving it scratches. Throwing a stick and gushing and clapping, looking sternly at something then picking it up, then whatever it is making him laugh: I love dogs. Same.
Corvayne nodded, and moved down the pipe they had been standing watch over. Noises echoed down it, chanting and clapping. It got louder as he crept forward, and as they moved around the bend Corvayne saw the reflection of a bonfire. He slowed as he saw darkened figures dancing in an open space around a stack of burning pallets. He looked back at Lady Blood Claw and Grunt then pulled his hood tight and slipped forward, spear in hand. There were a lot of people, and it was unlikely they could be knocked out like the previous group was. How did he feel about stabbing humans?
He focused back on the gang; a huge throng of dancing and yelling figures with drums, all clad skulls. He saw the fire lighting up hundreds of gang members faces and dancing forms, as well as piles of small animal bones scattered everywhere. It took him a moment to hear someone shouting from a long cage suspended in the dark above the bonfire. His eyes saw a pair of hands try to bend a bar and the cage shake a little. Looking up from the rusty cage he could see it was attached to a crane on the ceiling and followed it over to a control room. He motioned for a retreat and lead them back around the corner.
“I'd rather not have to take an entire cult on... Can we get to the control room through a different tunnel?”
Lady Blood Claw pulled up the map and they moved around to waterways that would take them up a layer and let them reach the control room. The drawings in this part of the tunnel looked like aliens that plastered Wick's room, except with three black eyes like holes in the white and red chalk. Corvayne saw a group coming ahead and motioned for everyone to hide in corners of a smaller square junction. Crouching in the dark he was sure they'd pass, but stepping into the room all three gang members stopped and spun to face Lady Blood Claw. They stiffened in an odd way for a moment, and their body language changed.
“Well well well. Look at what we have here.”
“She's perfect for the ritual.”
“Heh, yeah. Where you going little lady? Don't run.”
Corvayne didn't quite get why they said that, as Lady Blood Claw was walking right at them and punched all three in the face, knocking the skulls they were wearing off. “Scum bags!”
Grunt stood and made some hand motions, something tall, looking, something shorter, looking and a eurkea fist in palm: How the hell did they find YOU and not ME?
Lady Blood Claw looked at Corvayne. “Is my cloak defective?”
“No.” Corvayne saw it shimmering.
“Then this is stupid.” Lady Blood Claw said.
Corvayne nodded at both of his companions, then bent down and pointed at the groaning gang members. “They all sort of pointed at you at once... also the way they behave is odd. It's like they all notice you at once.” He picked up a skull and looked at it. “Maybe these things are not just a decoration in very poor taste... every skull someone's punched a hole in the forehead to make a third eye... you know, in stories it's a term for a person's extra senses.”
The alien woman kicked a thug, eliciting a groan. “Well I'd appreciate it if these goons didn't find me every time I hid.”
Going further up the pipes, they crouched to ambush another group of four gang members. Once more, they spotted Lady Blood Claw... who was in the far back of the entrance pipe, mostly hidden whereas the other two were inside the junction with them.
“Hey, we can use her! Get her!”
“Heheheh, missy, you're going to be the STAR of the show.”
“We'll make this ritual the strongest one with HER.”
Instead of getting their weapons ready to wound her so they could capture her, they'd just advance slowly, sometimes slapping their palms with their equipment. Corvayne followed Grunt to hit them from behind. Grunt slugged one, throwing them forward and to the ground. One went down to [Nerve Pinch]. Corvayne tried pulling the dog skull off the other gang members head, which prompted the man to whip around and attack with a knife. Corvayne ducked under the knife thrust and broke the mans arm then used a palm strike to break his face.
“Grunt hold that guy.” Corvanye directed.
Grunt just grabbed the fourth gang member, a woman who tried to spit on him and missed. “Heheh, you guys think you're tough, our master is coming... this whole world is going to burn!”
He undid the strap holding the dog skull to her head, and she started snarling and screaming and squirming to get out of Grunt's grip.
“You don't dare! Put it down! Put it back!”
He pulled it all the way off and dropped it on the ground, where it cracked. A moment later the woman screamed once and her eyes rolled up, shaking. Grunt dropped her and stepped away, looking a little disturbed but then shrugging.
Corvayne tried giving her a few prods to see if she'd wake back up, but the woman was out of it.
Lady Blood Claw poked his arm, and gestured with her head. “Let's just go.”
There was one more set of guards before the control room, who once again saw LBC through her cloaking and started walking up to her, wiggling their fingers rather then putting the rifles they had to any good use, and pretty much ignoring Corvayne and Grunt.
“You are perfect for the ritual!”
“Join the others. A tribute to the master!”
Corvayne knocked them both out and strode into the control room, a slightly less trashed space but still rusting and covered in dust from a lack of care. He looked up at the crane, which could be guided to an exterior walkway overlooking the crowd of dancing cultists as well as their bonfire. From above he could make out a clearly painted red pattern, encircling the bonfire and probably a part of the ritual. A few last bits were being painted on by more ornately adorned Bone Dog members. From here he couldn't tell if it was paint or blood. It was probably blood, it would fit how messed up the place was.
The cage was the important part. He could see eight people inside, and the control for it looked to be just a simple lever. He strode over and gently pulled the stick towards him and the platform. Grunt had turned and looked to be trying to warn him with his hands and Corvayne had a sudden spike of clarity where he realized Grunt been trying to reach Corvayne to tell him to NOT to touch the controls. Lady Blood Claw looked horrified as well, and Corvayne figured out what they had been worried about as the cage started drifting towards them with a titanic screech.
That caused everyone to look up, and see the cage moving, and with a roar they started charging at the tunnel entrances, especially the one that Corvayne knew would lead right to them. He could hear all sorts of the same lines every other guard said, all directed it seemed at Lady Blood Claw even though they were headed away from her at the moment.
“Get her!”
“For the ritual!”
“Where you going, miss?”
LBC sighed. “What a great fucking part of town.”