Elisayra didn't know what the point of this was. She had no clue why Casper had wanted her to steal documentation from a ship, what this ship was, who it belonged to or anything at all really.

If she was being honest with herself, which she often was, she was terrified.

Being scared wasn't unusual for her. In fact it was safe to say she was often scared. However the nature and origin of this fear was a unique one.

Elisayra had left the latest that evening. As the auction would be coming to a close the guards would be at their most tired which meant it was best to wait until now. However, that meant she had spent all day dreadfully anxious.

“Oh gods….” Elisayra moaned the words as she hugged her body to the wall of the auction house, half the distance along the dock to the boat in question.

she shivered almost invisibly as her well trained eyes scanned the docks around her. There were alot of guards, more guards than she had ever seen in one place. Almost a dozen lined the wooden docks themselves around the series of stacked barrels and crates, with a dozen more on the ship itself and several on rotating patrol around the area or moving between the locations.

Despite the collection of crates and barrels scattered around, the dock itself was built with security in mind. Nearly no blind spots showed themselves at all. No gaps in the guards visibility or their rotation. This was impossible…

The cause of Elisayra’s fear wasn't the impossible nature of the task at hand, no, in fact it was much scarier in her mind.

Elisayra was scared of upsetting Casper, in making him believe she was more useful than she actually was.

A shiver ran through Elisayra’s body at the thought of his anger at her. Forcing her to hug on tight to herself to steady the shaking.

She had gotten lucky, and that was it. Casper thought she was capable of a feat like this because she had been lucky enough to kill an attacker on the road. In reality she was just so small the man hadn't noticed her, she was Skinny and light enough to jump onto his back. And lucky enough to blindly bring her dagger down where the man's throat had been. Alex and Annabelle and Casper and even Nephinae seemed so unfased by the killing that she was too embarrassed to talk to any of them about how scary it was. How the nightmares kept her up at night…

She had been lucky, that the night her and Alex pleasure Casper, he was feeling merciful. She had messed up badly at first and hurt Casper, and only because of Alex's intervention did Casper not hurt her for her failure.

Casper clearly thought of her as capable, but she never thought his opinion of her abilities was so high…. no, that wasn't right. Casper is very intelligent, he could never have miscalculated her skill…

Elisayra wanted to cry, as she realized that this mission must be one Casper didn't expect her to return from.

this was a suicide mission then.

Casper must have understood that her successes up until this point were only luck, and now he wanted to be rid of her without The others knowing directly.

Elisayra sucked in some pained breaths as tears threatened to stain her cheeks.

This is what she deserved, she supposed. If this was Casper’s will then she would see it through to the very end. It was the least she could do to try and justify her pitiful, disgusting existence.

Elisayra sniffles slightly, and took In the finer details of the dock and the ship. She would die and fail doing her best. It was the very least she could do to prove to herself that she wasn’t completely useless.

Without any gaps in the rotation of guards and no blind spots for her abuse to sneak in, she realized she had very few options available to her.

Taking a look at these guards more closely, she watched as several conserved among one another. They kept any conversation curt and to the point. Each one seemed incredibly professional and well trained which would make it hard to play a damsel In distress or a vulnerable victim in waiting. She'd have to be more clever than that, she would have to return to her roots. No complex tricks, no grand plans like Casper seemed to make, no, there was a cleverness in simplicity.

Elisayra took her face, and rubbed it against the outside wall of the auction house, smearing the built up grime and dirt and dust over her face and hands

Taking off her new freshly washed cloak, with a sigh she stepped on it and dirtied it, dragging it across the well worn and well traveled dock until she was a disgusting mess.

Elisayra looked back out over the docks, and with her hood down, revealing her slightly pointed ears, she set to wandering the docks.

Her path was slow and aimless, for the most part. She took to meandering around the proximity with a distant look in her eyes until she felt that she was no longer seen.

It was a strategy she was intimately familiar with, because it was the exact course of action she had taken in the trough district of Insmouth that made her functionally invisible. Not for any magic or special ability. Instead, she became so visibly insignificant, so much a part of the surroundings, blending into the world around her as nothing more than a spec, she would be ignored by everyone.

After some time meandering, Elisayra began taking her nonsensical path to the docks. Much like in insmouth, even the trained guards who were meant to be on high alert couldn't see her. She had so thoroughly and completely blended in as a natural part of the city her presence closer and closer and closer to the docks was of no more significance than that of a rat or perching gull.

It helped that she was small, and light of foot, and it helped that her clothes were of the color of the surrounding grime caked onto the walls and docks and boats.

For a moment, the voice of a guard calling out almost made her freeze, however, she turned slightly to see the guard was yelling at some drunkard who had wandered too close. Her plan was working.

Unauthorized usage: this narrative is on Amazon without the author's consent. Report any sightings.

If it wasn’t so demeaning and insulting, she would be in awe at the sheer volume of blind spots the human mind had for things they simply wished to ignore. Then again, if it wasn’t so demeaning she wouldn’t enjoy it so much. So it had its own benefits she supposed.

Without even so much as a look in her direction, Elisayra had managed to walk up the ramp leading onto the boat through the minor gap in the guards walking patterns, and simply walked towards the captains quarters. Well, she figured they would be the captains quarters.

Elisayra had never been on a boat before, not one of this size at least, so she didn’t quite know what she was looking for other than “documents''. She figured documents would be kept away from the water most likely. And they probably wouldn't be where the crew would sleep. The only space big enough for a crew to sleep was below the deck, so the only other option would have to be that door leading to a space in what she might describe as the “mid deck” that space below the steering wheel, but above the walking area that ramp led to.

She tried to open the door, but found that it was locked. Looking around to see if anyone was watching her would break the illusion of her insignificance in the space so instead she trusted her gut, and pulled her tools from her hip and tried to pick the lock.

Whoever had designed the lock on this door was good. Very good. Elisayra wouldn’t say she was an expert, but she had picked a good number of locks in her life and this was working out to be the hardest. Luckily for her, she had other methods.

Most people looking to keep things safe would buy complex locks requiring complex keys to get in. A simple thief who failed to instantly pick the lock would be deterred enough to leave. Even those who took extra steps to ensure even higher levels of security would deter even experienced thieves, after all the more time spent trying to get in the more likely you were to be caught.

In Elisayra's case, she wasn’t just an experienced thief, she was a thief sent on a suicide mission. Getting caught was expected, so without the fear of taking too much time, she was afforded the ability to think carefully of how to break in. either she failed and was killed and she had tried her best, or she succeeded against all odds. Both were perfectly acceptable outcomes she was ready for.

The keyway was far too complex for Elisayra to open, and the internal mechanisms were too finely tuned to force up and out of the keyway in order to turn the tumbler. The frame of the lock was also all metal and sealed tightly to the door meaning jimmying something up into the mechanism from the sides was impossible.

Extending her scope beyond that of just the lock, she found her way in. The door to the captain's quarters itself wasn’t sitting perfectly flush to the surrounding walls. Given the ships extended time out in the ocean it was clear that the door had warped. Not enough to warrant a full replacement just yet, after all with the locking mechanism so carefully applied to the door, getting an entire replacement would be quite the cost she imagined. The warping in the doorway made the metal lock bar that held the door shut from the opposite side ever so slightly visibly.

Taking her dagger, Elisayra slid the blade along until she felt it tap the metal of the lock on the other side of the door itself.

With the door being warped, they wouldn’t have designed the metal to be placed internally, it would create too much of a possibility for it to bind in the warped wood, or cause rusting on the latch. That meant that the keyway was a full metal piece that connected one end of the door to the other, with the locking bar secured visibly to the opposite side of the door.

Elisayra wiggled her blade until it dug into the metal and began to work the blade up and down and back and forth with her right hand. With her left hand, she took her tools and inserted the pick, jiggling the pins inside gently.

The goal of this pick wasn’t to find the right level of pins or even force the bar to the other side, after all it would be secured tightly. Instead this was meant to do both of those things poorly to give her enough room to maneuver with a different approach, and after a minute of wiggling, one of the pins eventually gave and the chamber inside the lock started a half rotation.

The door became half unlocked. The bar sliding slightly out of position and the keyway rotating to a halfway point, and now with alot more wiggle room.

With the lock now in a better position. Elisayra brought her dagger up deeper into the door jam, and wiggled the bar hard. Not enough to cause damage to the door, but enough to force the cylinder inside the locking mechanism to rotate just enough to give the bar clearance. With a slight tug, the door came loose and swung open.

With a sigh of relief, Elisayra slipped inside the captain's quarters and closed the door behind her, relocking the door manually by forcing the bar back into its fully locked position.

The captain's quarters itself was unlike anything she had seen before, namely because she had never seen a captain's quarters in general.

Small windows set into the curving back wall look out over the expansive ocean to the north, the evening sun turning the water into a blinding mirror of yellow light.

The quarters themselves are impressively large, with a huge desk set near the back most section of wall. Maps and charts, as well as books sit neat and organized on the top of the desk. A wardrobe blocks the view of the bed from the doorway, and a heavy trunk takes up the foot of the bed. Shelves line the walls as well, each one housing some trinket or item from pretty stones to paintings and small statuettes.

Elisayra has to shake the moment of dazed awe from her body as she realizes she needs to get to work quickly.

She moves to the desk and begins to carefully examine the contents on top, as well as investigating the drawers at the desks sides for any important looking documentation.

The sound of footsteps overhead makes her pause for just a moment. They sounded hurried, rushed, almost panicked slightly.

Oh gods, had someone actually spotted her?

She picked up the pace as she hunted around for anything that looked important, using her tools to pick the locks on the chest and some of the locked drawers, she finally found what she was looking for, or so she hoped.

The sounds of nearly a dozen heavy footfalls made their way from above her, to somewhere else on the deck. Shouts came from outside and sent her heart racing.

Elisayra grabbed a handful of important looking documents. She knew they were important because they were in a locked drawer near the desk, and nearly all of them were written on thick, fine paper with signatures and wax seals visible.

Stuffing the documents under her arm, she considered grabbing the other couple of items she had spotted in her search.

A small liquid contained in a vial sat glowing faintly in the desk drawer. A ring with some design on it she didn’t recognize, though it matched the design on the wax seals on the documents, and a necklace it looked like made of delicate silver.

As the footsteps got closer to the door, she grabbed the items that had caught her eye and looked around for a way out.

The lock jiggled slightly.

there was no way out. She looked to the windows only to find them closed and locked from within as well.

It would take too long to pick and she would soil the documents if she fell into water.

oh gods oh gods oh gods…

Oh gods, this was bad. That was really really bad. Elisayra's breath quickened as she racked her brain for a way out of this. Her mind quickly turned to the bed, there was just enough space underneath for her to slide into. It was the only option she could think of.

In a panicked frenzy she closed everything she had opened in her search and dove for the small space under the bed.

She scrambled her feet and hands to claw her way under, squeezing tightly just as the locking mechanism from the door burst into the room with a crack and a shower of splintering wood.

What the hell!? Had someone just smashed the entire lock off the door? Elisayra shivered at the thought.

A low voice spoke like a song over the ambient creaking of the ship.

“My - oh - my…someone got here before me…”