Jarv climbed out of the taxi-cab and moved around to the driver's window. He pulled out a bundle of paper from his bag and began awkwardly fumbling through it, trying to find the sheets whose numbers would accumulate to the cost of the ride.

The currency in this place seemed innately flawed. All but the most meager amounts of money were represented by paper sheets, all identical in color, weight, texture, and size, differing only in subtle surface details. It made dealing with as an outsider painful, and if he had less than perfect vision he'd be truly fucked.

He finally passed enough of the papers into the cab that the driver was satisfied, and turned to look at the hiding spot of the Empire of Drek'thelamagne's second bastion.

The Tickled Pink Inn was a run-down establishment even to Jarv's inexperienced eye. A spirit-light sign –never the indicator of quality that the cheaper establishments imagined– hung above the doors, spelling out the place's name, while a spirit-light diagram of a female human face gave it an intimate air.

In Drek'thelamagne, an inn decorating its signage with the image of a human face would be advertising that it was human-exclusive, and thus that its owners and patrons were the worst sort of people, liable to be the first harvested for their souls by any self-respecting dreadlord aspirant. On Earth however, humans were the only speaking sentients as far as Jarv could see, so there was no such implication.

He began walking around the building, looking for the entrance to the outpost.

Here the buildings weren't the fragile, towering things he'd seen from afar. They were modest four or five level blocks, roughly as broad as they were tall. Safe, solidly built structures of brown or red brick.

The dishes and wires many of them sprouted were only briefly confusing to Jarv, who soon recognized them as communication aids; signal collectors and transferrence threads. Even if he hadn't been briefed on them, the way the dishes were a bowl focused onto a rod would imply their function as ambient amplifiers.

Finally on the fourth wall he checked, Jarv found the entrance to the outpost. A back alley opened on a stairway which led down to a steel door, recessed from the wall and tucked away out of sight.

It wasn't the ideal place for a bastion. It was hard to get to, and impossible to fortify. The surroundings weren't pleasant, and they weren't convenient. But it was nondescript, and the Tickled Pink had been one of a surprisingly few number of places willing to sell them property, even for more precious metals and luxury goods than a site could possibly be worth. It seemed on this part of Earth, even gold was monitored and regulated, and compliance with the law of the land was more valued than precious gems.

It spoke of more than just a heavy-handed and omnipresent system of laws. It signified some deeper difference in their culture, one Jarv hadn't been able to unpick yet.

He descended the steps and approached the steel door. It looked normal to a casual inspection. Nothing unusual or eldritch about it. It wouldn't look too out of place in a lower class Dron'alon establishment.

He reached into a concealed pocket of his suit jacket and drew his dagger. It was one of the few real pieces of Dron'alon equipment he'd been assigned, and the only weapon he'd been allowed.

The hilt was steel wrapped in clustershark skin, mundane except for the excellent grip it provided. The narrow crossguard was made of century wood, stronger and lighter than steel. The blade itself was a two-finger length of glassy crystal –trenchclam pearl– cut and honed to better than a razor's edge. The material of the blade looked white in direct light, but glittered with dreamlike hues and images when in shadow.

It glittered now, obscure deep sea creatures appearing on the blade as ghostly reflections, before the light seemed to change, leaving the images as nothing more than passing mirages.

He used the dagger to nick the back of his hand. It took an effort for him to bleed real blood, but after a second of concentration a bead of red bloomed along the cut.

He stowed the knife back in its hidden sheath and wiped the drop of blood onto the tip of his finger, before touching it to the door.

The drop flowed down the steel without surface tension or resistance, finding hidden channels and spreading out, inking the lines of an elaborate diagram.

As Jarv watched the blood flow into the final loops of the design, it occurred to him that if someone back in Administration objected to his bargain with Justice and wanted him dead, and someone almost certainly did, then 'accidentally' failing to key him into the outpost array would be a good way to get him shredded by whatever protections were built into the door.

It didn't work out like that, which was lucky since he'd thought of it too late to do anything about it.

The diagram flared red and disappeared. The steel door split down the center and the sides folded silently back, revealing a dimly lit corridor.

Jarv felt it when he crossed the threshhold. A background tingle in the air, a feeling of warmth that had nothing to do with temperature. The air in the outpost was humid with spirit energy.

It was a comforting feeling that he'd missed since leaving the station in Thunder Bay. While the density of the background energy didn't have any influence on the practical aspects of draurcraft, it was needed for some of the supporting rituals. Soul surgery, tokenization, delving, and icon blending all needed external sources of energy, either from a vessel or the surroundings. Here was one of three places on the planet he knew he'd have access to it. He'd love to know how they maintained it.

What he judged to be the main corridor of the outpost wasn't particularly notable. Bare plaster walls, a gray stone floor. It looked like it ran the entire length of the building above, with rooms breaking off to the left and right.

As Jarv pushed deeper into the base, his hearing was pricked by low voices in one of the side rooms.

"The story is he was an archeologist on the temple dig at Zu-eki, the year after we retook Dun'galgogh. Not the head researcher or anything, just a fucking... bone duster. He labeled the samples."

Jarv took a quiet step forward.

The voice was that of a young adult, maybe in his twenties or thirties. He had a polished imperial college accent, and he spoke with a cadance that had a kind of cruelty to it. Jarv had heard voices like that a hundred times before, coming from lips that sneered, snarled, and in the brighter moments of his career screamed.

"That doesn't match up with what came later," a second voice said. "Maybe you're mixed up?"

Jarv silently despaired of the security preparations around the entrance. There should have been some kind of alarm or alert, even after an authorized use of the door. A person's blood, after all, wasn't hard to come by.

"No, it's all documented. It was in the confession they read out at the trial," the first voice insisted. "One day he was a perfectly satisfied pebble sorter or what have you, and the next he went mad and started pulling soul fragments out of some kind of ancient horror."

He moved silently up to the source of the voices, pausing outside.

"What do you mean ancient horror?"

"Some elder thing buried under the temple. You know how it goes."

Jarv stepped forward and burst through the door, letting it slam back against the wall as he appeared in the doorway.

"Firstly," Jarv said, "I wasn't at all satisfied. I've never experienced a more intellectually stifled or hierarchically perverse environment before or since, including in prison."

There were actually three people in the room beyond the door, Jarv realized. All human, all aged between twenty and forty. There was a man in his thirties with yellow hair and a sneer who Jarv was sure had been the first speaker, a brown-skinned man in his early twenties who yelped as Jarvis burst in, and a woman probably in her mid twenties with straight black hair, whose faintly segmented pupils marked her out as likely having Ansect ancestry.

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"Secondly," Jarv continued, "Nix-nix-chittalias-desth; Them Which Feeds on the Detritus We Call Civilization had excellent hearing, and that was one of the tokens I pulled out of it."

Jarv took two long slow steps towards the yellow-haired man, who was smiling the smile of someone whose pride didn't permit them to be in trouble.

"Thirdly, Nix-nix also had big snippy claws, that could pop a human's head right off with one clip."

He held out a hand in front of the man's face and snapped his fingers closed a couple of times to demonstrate.

The woman leaned to her left, whispering to the yellow-haired man.

"I think he heard you call him a pebble sorter."

The yellow-haired man folded his arms, still smirking.

"So what? I don't know how a convicted criminal managed to get himself named captain, but it's a farce."

Jarv met the man's eyes, frowning. He stared back with a defiant smirk.

Jarv tried to remember his briefing on the Chicago office staff, trying to put an identity to the man. He was almost certainly second generation hierarchy or older. He was too loose with his tongue to have survived many years in the imperial court, so he was probably wearing his true age. His accent and attitude pegged him as an imperial college graduate.

Honestly he was everything Jarv hated about the imperial hierarchy. Effortlessly privileged, held themself with total but baseless superiority, oblivious that anything could go wrong for him.

Jarv had been worrying on the trip all the way down from Thunder Bay that one of his enemies would try and set a trap for him, or co-opt his staff somehow. He hadn't expected to catch someone undermining him so openly.

The woman cut in. "Pau, that's technically insubordination. Be careful. Remember we're an infiltration unit in enemy territory."

The woman also spoke with an imperial college accent, but it was practiced in a way that Pau's wasn't. Jarv could hear currents of the snipped Bon'delzost street speech hiding beneath the meticulously crafted consonants, and her bearing had none of the traits universal in the children of old hierarchy.

Pau waved the woman off. "The terms of his parole stop him from harming any imperial employee. We could ignore every word he says and he wouldn't even be able to birch us."

Jarv felt a moment of panic skittering across his thoughts. That information was meant to be confidential. Jarv's confession was locked and sealed. Who'd told him? Someone in the hierarchy?

This was no good. This was just another hierarchy stooge out to get him. He had to die.

"You're right, I can't harm any imperial employee," Jarv said. "However, since they made me a captain, I can fire you. You're fired."

The man's expression became contemplative for a second, his eyes sliding off to the side, his face locked in frozen calculation. He opened his mouth to say something.

Jarv wrapped his hand around the man's neck and brought his fingers together.

There was a hissing sound like a drop of molten metal meeting water and the man's head popped off, flying two feet before dropping to the floor and rolling under a desk.

The other man in the room yelped, then quietly said, "Oh my."

Within his soul, Jarv felt the token that represented Nix-nix's claw fade into the background, dormant for now, until he could process enough energy to reawaken it. That was fine. He had a spare.

The man's headless body slumped backwards in his chair.

He was dead, though not the true death that the Empire was holding over Jarv.

The life in the man's body was damaged beyond repair, but the rest of the soul would remain intact for days or weeks. It would slowly decay, just as the body would, but it would be at least a day before anything was irrevocably lost.

"That was our cultural liason," the woman sitting in the chair next to the corpse said. Her voice rose. "That was a human being. He had a family! You killed him."

"Ah relax, I only killed his body," Jarv said, pushing the body out of the chair.

He sat down, pulling the journal from his bag and flipping through to his Chicago briefing notes.

"That was Junisori Paumi Aschlenchi," Jarv said, reading from the book. "An imperial college dropout, not a graduate. He had one family member, a great granddad in the imperial military. Nobody's going to mourn him, except maybe whoever paid the bribes for him to bypass all these aptitude requirements."

"That doesn't make it better!" she said. After a few exasperated seconds, she added, "What do you mean bribes?"

Jarv turned the journal briefly to let the others glance at it, then twisted on the chair and spoke to the woman.

"Nobody offered to let me bribe my way past my assessments," the other man in the room said.

"It depends who you know," Jarv said.

The woman ran her fingers through her hair.

Jarv turned a page, then looked up at the woman in the next seat.

"You must be Leverant Indrie Almust, the oversight officer."

She nodded.

"And you're Special Operative Eind Wellas-Meln?" he asked the other boy.

"Yes, that's right. I'm the mission draurcraftyst."

Eind was soft-spoken, with an accent that sounded subtly Rhymeish. His voice was rounded off by general elements of Drek'thelamagny pronunciation rather than the hierarchy accent. He probably hadn't attended the imperial college. Jarv doubted if he'd ever even been to the capital.

Indrie let out a long breath, turning back to her desk and searching out a sheet of blank paper.

"I guess I better ask Thunder Bay to send us a new culture specialist."

"No need," Jarv said, stuffing the journal back into his bag.

"We do need a cultural liason. This place is a witherstorm of mores and taboos."

"I'm going to recruit a local." Jarv stood, then asked Eind, "Do we have a ritual room here?"

Paumi was dead, but that didn't mean Jarv didn't need answers.

"Down the corridor," Eind answered. "The last door on the right."

"Thanks," Jarv said.

He grabbed the corpse of Paumi and began dragging it out of the room. As he passed through the doorway he heard Eind whispering.

"Did he say he was going to recruit an Earth-native human?"

Jarv hauled the body all the way to the empty room at the far end of the base.

He still needed to improve the base's security, sort out his living arrangements, and look into a replacement for Paumi, but all of that could wait. Right now he had a dead body and lines to cross.