Meanwhile....
Argyle gasped as he reformed into one of his last clones. Ruined! Everything was a mess! He had lost all of his equipment and most of his doubles, having thrown everything at trying to reclaim The Core. Fucking goat-shit! The Princess, that weight-lifter, the Baron and Havortti, everyone, all of them SCREWED him! Oh, they were probably mocking him right now, thinking they had won. Only a fool would assume their enemy wasn't armed with trump cards and fall backs. Oh yes, clever move, somehow swapping him into a train!
He cleared his throat and blinked, internal ranting dying down as he took stock of where the clone he snapped into had been: A neon lit back alley in Ko-Ban, just off market street. It was odd that he didn't have more then this and a backup close by, one that was in a dark sewer or tunnel somewhere. If he had time, he'd need to review what exactly had happened with each of the clones. He'd not bother with it yet, he needed to move fast, and sorting memories was disorienting and best done sitting or laying down lest he add throwing up to the evening's indignities.
There was still a crowd walking through the market not to far from his clone, despite everything in the universe going fucking tits up. Perfect! He'd blend in, steal a few things during stopped time, then use his vehicle mantra to rebuild his helicopter. He wasn't sure the princess would think to immediately start tracking his bounty, but with all the extra portals she might think to be in subspace as fast as he could get there. So, he could get into a distant rift and dive deep through doors, get enough space between him and her posse that he could earn and then dump money on hiding. Yes! He would assemble a helicopter from parts in the market and be to the desert site in as little as four hours, and from there he'd dive into the deep subspace. He could cover vast stretches of ground both with his time walking and the helicopter.
A specter of greed slipped into his thoughts as he considered it: A completely virgin Subspace entrance! Forget The Baron, he'd rob this new gold mine for everything he could possibly need to get back at his enemies! He'd come back with a hundred clones, all armed with magic items and made from high quality materials. An army as strong as him, should he find enough enchanted robes to convert into copies. No need to try to appease the police, he could bury the entire city in a bamboo grave with a hundred fully powered copies. If the Baron had abandoned him, why would he care about dragging the man's reputation through the mud? Not to mention he had come to HATE this place. The rustic charm of buildings sitting on land and ground based travel had worn very, very thin.
He stopped and ripped a pipe off the wall of a building. If he happened to see one of those brats, he'd get them started on a proper funeral this time. Just slay them flat out, no lucky breaks! Maybe not the body builder... Argyle did not like the idea of seeing him again without an army of backups. The faint trace of fear he felt was shocking. Even during the worst string of bad luck he had, even with The Baron himself furious with him he had never been afraid. Something about the heartless face of the princess's whip-wielding knight was bothering him. Argyle shook the feeling away. He was stronger then his weaknesses. He was alone in the universe because he was a shooting star.
He stepped into the marketplace and walked past stalls of parts and the weaklings browsing them, using his time stopping ability to steal parts. A waste of his talents, but he didn't have money to go with his pride. Anger quashed his fear further, so much that he was half tempted to go back, while they were no doubt licking their wounds, and finish the job! Poor anger management be damned, it made sense!
He stepped off the street, feeling the simpler blue robe he was wearing sway with stolen metal parts stuffed into his pockets. Argyle felt better already and found himself diving into the thought of revenge. He was so focused on how he was going to pay his enemies back a hundredfold that he almost walked into a wall. Stopping, he saw the wall was wearing painters coveralls.
He looked up and saw a broad face that looked almost comically gormless. A perfect painting of a dull-witted thug... wait! This was one of their friends! His source had told him about who Anastasia kept company with, and provided him with the big man's picture. Perfect!
The man clearly knew him too, looking down at him as he stepped back, then pointing at him, then drawing a sausage finger across his neck with a grimace. How generic! How pitiful. As imposing as he looked, absurd bundles of muscles were a sign of inefficient training once you surpassed human norms.
“Since your friends harmed me, you will die a dogs death.” Argyle happily informed him, then stopped time by clutching it and twisting it. As everything went a little gray he calmly stepped around the oaf, lining up his feet to attack. A good solid hit, maybe upwards to pop the head off? No, use the weight of the weapon and just crush his skull. Getting a firm grip on his lead pipe but carefully not starting his attack, he resumed time as he fluidly lifted and slammed the makeshift stave down hard enough that the concrete around the man's feet shattered.
Argyle knew something was wrong when he saw the pipe had broken and the man wasn't even bleeding. The big figure met Argyle's eyes and shook his head sadly. When he spoke, there was something wrong with his voice. Something that twisted Argyle's guts when he heard it. It felt like an ice pick in his ears.
“You had yer chance, laddie!” the thick man called out as he produced a fireman's axe. The man's face started spewing hair, an absurdly large beard flowing out of his face. Argyle yanked time as hard as he could, moving down the alleyway away from what looked like hair flowing like water. As color returned and time sped up, he felt a sharp pain then his legs go numb as something spinning and green blasted by him, slamming into the wall near him. Argyle fell over, then noticed he was missing everything under his torso. He was in shock. How?
The thug was striding over to him, twirling his axe. “Lil roach, ain't goin let ya harm wee Corvayne!” Argyle, seeing the man's face from on the ground looking up, was flooded with memories of baseball bats slamming into clones faces. Over and over. The big man then happily brought his axe down on Argyle's head.
Argyle's next clone was somewhere dark. Odd. He tried to move and felt something dig into his wrist. What... he was tied to a chair! It was in what looked like a dingy kitchen, lit only from what looked like a dim bulb in another room. He tried to flex and break the rope, but it felt like all his power had been sapped away.
“Oh... welcome welcome! Have a seat!” A woman's voice with fake cheer called out as she stepped into the kitchen, glowing with her own light. Dawn-something-or-other. The crime boss who he had been briefed to avoid before he started his guard duty. Tch. He flexed again, tried stopping time, aging the rope, getting mold on the rope to run rampant and dissolve it... nothing.
“Let me go, and my boss will reward you.” Argyle said, not liking that he felt fear flooding back into him. Something was very wrong about the woman. It was like the one time he had met the Baron's patron. The woman smiled and patted him on the head.
“Oh honey, you don't remember it, but you know you killed my little ray of sunshine once, Wick? And this time around, you messed her up pretty bad. Not only that, you got her involved in... hmmf... adventuring. She's forming a party, going off and getting into extreme danger. Meanwhile, I'm stuck here. Helpless to stop her from getting herself killed. Again.”
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The woman moved over to a drawer and pulled it open. Argyle put on a brave face, and snorted. Even with powers suppressed, eventually he would die and be free. At the very least, they could skip the pointless torture. “You kill me, I'll just go into a different clone. We should work out a deal. I am currently unemployed. I have skills that would benefit you.”
Dawn just stared at him, face beyond love or hate but at a point of total apathy. How many people had he looked at the same way, like a bug? He couldn't help but start sweating, reaching out with his still functioning quantum link, sure that he would find a clone somewhere off world. He always kept a few backups. He'd survive this, and like a cockroach that wouldn't die he'd come back, somewhere, and...
Faint memories started to surfaces. Baseball bats. Those clones falling over. One getting drowned by a huge meaty arm pushing his face down into mid. Another that had a truck dropped on them. Over and over he recalled the large bearded man with an axe welled up, a visage of death rising from a sea of fur, stained red with blood. His blood.
The connections were cold. He heard the woman rifling through metal in the drawer, and he kept pushing his senses out. He couldn't feel any clones. Where were they? WHAT HAPPENED?! More memories, baseball bats. Huge hands, stronger then him, crushing his throat. A rock dropped on him. A giant figure blasting through walls as it ran unerringly for him. How? How had he found them all? This couldn't be happening! Not to him!
He heard Dawn pull something out of the drawer.
“I can be... I can be useful!” Argyle's memory filled him with hundreds of clones terror, the last second memory of a cheery giant hunting him down over and over. He had been tracked across numerous bodies on many worlds, all in the last two weeks, all by a that dumb thug! If he hadn't been weaving an army of clones, he'd have noticed! Still. She might just pull a nail or two. You had to scare someone to get a good deal right? Argyle did not need motivation to act scared as he heard her humming, and the sifting of metal objects in the drawer.
He felt his guts drop as he recalled the how uncomfortable his underworld contacts and even his information source were about Dawn. All that terror had been focused on one thing. One recurring mundane object that was linked to the woman, found in grocery stores everywhere, the center of a threat that had seemed silly to Argyle before. He pulled his wrist against the rope, hard, trying to break the chair or the cord. He nearly tipped the chair over as he felt it dig into his arm. He was made of steel! It shouldn't harm him at all!
Unless she had shut it down. She had shut everything down.
Dawn was looking at something, her back turned him. Argyle stammered as he spoke, pushing words out in a way that he could only think of a man on a sinking ship, bailing water. “I said, I can tell you... about the Baron! I'm strong, you need agents right? Miss Dawn, trying to kill your friend Wick was a mistake!”
Dawn picked something up, then turned and craned her neck to look back at him. “You were going to take her alive. I can hear outside my domain, you know? Heard what you said.... what you MEANT on the tracks. You know what they'd do to her, right? Yes. You know. I saw it. That moment you wanted to throw up a little. Even you think it's too much?”
Argyle started nodding furiously. He knew about the ritual. He had seen the aftermath. He... he had been offered it. He did not partake.
“I would never, never actually...”
“That you have a shred of remorse... That will help you.” Dawn turned back to what she was looking at, and dropped something that shed flakes of rust onto the counter, then turned back to the drawer.
“That bit where a part of you feels regret for what you do... I won't do the full course on you. This isn't even entirely about being furious at you, some of it is just, well, I'm sure everything you did was just a job, right? Think of it as my job. You're pretty lucky I'm in a good mood, you know? You're lucky...”
Argyle for a moment started to hope. Maybe he was going to go free, and what they had said about her favorite way of showing displeasure was wrong.
Dawn turned, holding a brand new carrot peeler that she swung around a finger. “Though, you probably won't feel that lucky.”
Argyle started screaming.
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Mister I hummed to himself, cycling his Chi as he strolled down the street. His patients were all wrapped up nice and neat in their beds, and Mosh had returned with Hari and they had offered to keep an eye on the three worst cases. Thank heavens he didn't need to keep an eye on them by himself. It was good for youth to do something for their elders! He had plucked some of his good lizard tail jerky from Avalon II out of a jar and was chewing on it as he strolled down the street. He needed the protein to help keep his mind sharp, because he smelled a mystery! Yes, something had bothered him about the fight. A little detail, leading to another little detail, to another, all ones someone who hadn't lived in Old Town for a long time might have missed.
He walked along the sidewalk next to Copper Mill road, ignoring the few cars blazing down the street while looking at two particular buildings coming up on his right. One of them was a machine shop that never got running and which had developed a leak in the roof that ended up collapsing the floor in spots. The other was an old micro factory that mostly did custom industrial parts for locals and some of the island's factories. The owner had moved to north Ko-Ban ten years back but sometimes dropped into the meetings Wick held. Nice fellow! Lucky for him Corvayne decided to break the right window when he entered the alleyway rather then one on the left. Except...
Mister I took out a mag light and twisted the handle, then stepped into the ruined machine shop, not far enough to plummet into the basement, of course! He wasn't very afraid of an extra Argyle popping out. Grunt had told him that it was 'taken care of' and while he played the fool well, Mister I felt he was somewhat of an expert on it! If Grunt gave him a thumbs up, then he was once more the only monk in town, as poor of a monk as he was! Hah!
He hummed happily and shone the light across what he could see from the monk-made entrance to Copper Mill Road, then strolled along the near wall to the corner wall, spotting glass on the floor, then lifting his flashlight up at a blank wall. Moving the light over to the hole that the monk had punched into the wall, he saw the gap, and the bricks laying on the floor in a way that only someone 'Kool-aid-man' bursting through a wall would leave. A little beyond it, he saw the rather filthy wall of the next building over, the gap between the buildings no more then a foot. A gap he had seen Corvayne and Argyle dash into, followed by a bevvy of clones. He did not recall them turning sideways, as would be needed to squeeze in there.
He stepped back out of the building and walked to the Brines Brother's much abused warehouse, ignoring the hole riddled building. He had pressed the lovely Miss Blood Claw about what she had seen while treating her arm, and she had given him a fairly accurate idea of how they had ran away from a ravenous swarm of stick swinging Argyles. Argylites? Argolings. He liked Argolings! Perhaps they spawned in twos? They made the same sort of sound as the other ling-think he thought of when they hit things! Hah! Anyway, he ran his eyes along the building as he followed the street around it, looking at the gap that Corvayne tore in the side, and followed the line of the roof down the street and across to a grimy boot print fifteen feet above the ground where Corvayne had kicked off the wall after leaping, landing on the sidewalk. So far, so good. All lines up.
Lady had specified that there were Argyles clogging the streets around the warehouse. But the direction they ran had gotten every clone to line up behind them. She had said 'they turned right and ran right over to Copper Mill Road' after he jumped off a roof. She was pretty upset about the roof, and had not spent as much time here as Corvayne did. And Corvayne had a lovely young woman on his back, no doubt pressing against him with her charms. Ah! To be young again. He'd have to ask what Corvayne saw after running down the road in the back of the factory, but it probably wasn't this Cul-de-sac where the street ended. You could turn a building after the warehouse and double back to streets that would eventually let you turn left to get another block over to Copper Mill. Perhaps they simply forgot a bunch of twisting and turning?
The third stop on his little tour was closer to home, and he saved it for last since after his little investigation he could go to Ayame and get noodles and maybe do a 'house call' as he did for so many other women in the neighborhood. Putting dessert aside, even Grunt had scratched his head about how Corvayne got to the yellow line off of Copper Mill. Wick didn't notice because, well, streets and alleyways were boring. Even though he loved Old Town and it's rustic industrial charm, he couldn't totally dismiss such a position: Old Town was an ugly grid that hadn't respected the natural flow of the island, and you had to be a stickler for details to notice things didn't add up. Corvayne was out of his element in that he had gone this way... possibly three times? So Wick's recount of the last part of the fight, even with her being in pain, didn't make her stop and question how they made it through the last alleyway to cut from the street to the stairs up, on Portview. The alleyway he was looking at, which was only direct route from the street they fought on to where he ran to, was three inches wide and little bits of garbage were wedged in between the buildings. Oh yes! Maybe there was a mistake.
“One might be a mistake, two might be a coincidence, three is a conspiracy.” He quoted himself as he looked at the gap. “The city must love you like a woman does, Corvayne, to open paths where there are none.”