There wasn't much Jason could do about Tahmina's healing wing aside from apologize profusely and flood the GC between them with his remorse. She snapped at him, her desire for him to take his remorse and back off coming back through the GC loud and clear.
Jason backed up and looked away, shamed. Which is how his gaze swept over Adam and he saw the blood trail across the armor plating of the shadow wolf's face originating at his swollen eye.
"Shit!" Jason cussed. "Adam, how'd you get hurt and what can we do to help?"
The wolf whined at him, but had no answers. He was a smart canine, but that didn't make him into a Tapestry-recognized sapient, monstrously so or Aware. Jason dug into his gear bag, coming up with one of the waterskins and a fluffy bit of cloth that served as a wash rag. Lena made towels that felt like super plushies. The things could soak up what felt like twice their volume in water, but when dry they felt softer than the chamois he used to use to polish his truck.
He wetted the wash rag and gently began to clean the blood off Adam's face. Tahmina must have smacked into him, probably got a talon up that scratched his vulnerable eye.
Even as he worked, the swelling around their wolf's eye went down. After Jason finished wiping away the blood and crusty bits, Adam blinked his eye open. Streaks of red from the lingering damage faded while the wolf rubbed at Jason's hands for more of that sweet, sweet itch relief.
Gave Adam the attention the wolf demanded, knowing that he was getting off light with the wolf's desire for affection as recompense for the harm he had done, even it was because they startled him out of sleep.
Jason firmly pushed back on the memories of other startled wake ups his brother or his mother's latest boyfriends had subjected him to. That crap was in his past and that's where it needed to stay.
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There was no going back to bed for Jason, so after doing all he could for the creatures, Jason got dressed. Rob showed him the Camp Cleaner toy their resident tinkerers had cobbled together, and he used it to get cleaned up before putting on his clothes. Lena had included their personal possessions, which hadn't been that much. Rob had managed his usual imitation of a pack rat a little better than Jason, but not by much.
For Jason, the personal stuff came down to a journal, a few knives with matching sheaths, and his clothes. Everything else he had needed, all the incidentals, had been provided by Lena in the communal areas.
He counted up the coins Lena gave them next. Thinking back to the information that they had gained during negotiations with the city council, he reviewed just what those coins meant.
What Lena had provided was called Free currency, and it functioned off of base eight. Eight bronze bits to a nickel kop, eight kops to a copper tail, and eight tails to a silver nob. There were half pieces, but few merchants liked dealing in them, mainly because the were made of mixed metals, and the metallurgical tech wasn't that great. Most metals came from dungeon delving, not mining. As far as Jason could tell, smiths relied on spell Skills to work their craft.
Over all, the half pieces had a tendency toward irregularities that made them harder to string together. All of the coins had holes in the centers. The bits were round, just thick enough not to bend easily, and no wider than Jason's thumb. The kops were thicker and square, as were the tails. The nobs thinned down again and were round. Gold pieces belonged to merchant currencies. As they weren't likely to make any bulk purchases, or look for items that were extremely exotic, gold was more of a liability to carry than an asset.
"Strings" of the coins, in the local parlance, equated to thirty-two coins. With that in mind, Lena had given them three strings of bits, two strings of kops, a string of tails, and another string of nobs, in addition to the stuff Rob called their walk about money, a string of mixed coins: half bits, a quarter kops, six tails, and two nobs.
Rob had paid their expenses off of his walk about string. Jason tucked his own string into an inner pocket of his vest.
He normally thought of vests as frippary for preppy duche bags and fancy events, but Lena had layered in armor plates and something that acted like kevlar between the pretty designs adorning this vest, making it just fancy, non-threatening armor. It also helped that this wasn't Earth, and he didn't have to deal with figuring out fashion. Another point in its favor: Rob had helped design the look of it. Rob was not a duche bag, and so this was not duche wear.
The shirt he wore had the comfortable feel of his T-shirts, but long sleeved with the stretchy cuffs of finely knitted garments. It was a creamy off white in color. The pants were based off their jeans, only not blue. They were, in fact, a tan shade of brown that blended in with the local dust and dirt, making them most excellent work pants.
None of them had known enough about shoe technology for the Grand Tapestry to ferret out the patterns of their sneakers, so Lena and Candy had examined the versions the Tapestry had assigned them when it "instantiated their patterns" into the world. Jason preferred the Tapestry's versions, and Lena had used that as a basis for some of her "sanity crafting projects", which resulted in the armored boots he wore. They, too, were brown, and their jeans tucked in to the boot tops quite nicely.
Rob, too, got dressed and ready for the day. They left Tahmina curled up on Rob's bed, Rostem up on top of the wardrobe, and Adam guarding the chair when they went downstairs to see what the inn offered in the way of breakfast.
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Arassi were obligate carnivores. Beast kin and targonauts were omnivores, with dietary preferences that followed the paths of their bestial heritage. Elves had a preference toward the leafier side of the food divide, and Gnomes did best on diets that more closely resembled a healthy human diet.
The grin Rob gave the platter of meat slices earned him a disturbed look from the fox kin youth. That was hardly surprising, though. Everything about Rob seemed to mark him as the odd elf out.
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Watching the other patrons in the common room as they watched Rob reminded Jason of the occasions he had wandered into Rob's favorite bar without Rob. There was a wariness in their eyes, an assessing gleam matched only by the resentment that tightened their bodies. The Gatos Gris bar crowd had eased up on him a lot when Rob was with him and even more after Rob introduced him around as an Army buddy who "understood how to get things done" and "didn't buy into bullshit".
The resentment reaction of the Splendid Tails crowd showed itself especially strong among the arassi. Jason was just glad that it was breakfast and not dinner, that the folks with their scales ruffling still had clear heads and the freshness of recent rest. He didn't want to see what happened when that wasn't the case.
They were most of the way through a breakfast of bread, freshly picked sweet beans, and rabbit meat when a familiar arassas sat down at their table.
"Jason Kline, Roberto Garcias, a surprising pleasure to see you here. How fairs the other Dreamers?" This arassas had scales painted black with a faint silver sheen. He wore a leather cuirass, also dyed black, over a well cared for black and brown uniform.
"Is it?" Jason asked.
Rob smacked him upside the back of his head. "Don't be an ass." Turning his attention to their guest, he said, "My apologies for grumpy guts here, Kargerran. He hasn't had his morning coffee. Though, I gotta admit, I'm curious too if this really is a surprise. After all, this is the inn Guardsman Wayne recommended, and you are on friendly terms with Corporal Ignemrot."
Kargerran shrugged. "I would love to find out what this 'coffee' is. I might be on good terms with the Studio Liaison, but I haven't talked with him since the day before yesterday. I'm taking it something happened?"
Jason drew in a breath, but Rob beat him to it. "We're on a general reconnaissance mission for the Studio to explore the larger world and report back our findings. Jason and I are the only members of the original crew with anything looking like experience related to that, so we're here to look for guides and some additional guards before we take off to discover if the world's as close to this Unraveling thing as we're getting told and how the various people of the world want to deal with it."
Kargerran sucked in a breath, making a hissing sound as he did so. "An Unraveling, you say?"
It was Rob's turn to shrug. "That's what we're getting told. It relates to that whole Karth Sun Elf thing you guys didn't want to deal with. Above your pay grade, I know."
Jason sat back. He didn't feel the need to speak up. There was no pressure to step into the conversation, to steer it. That impetus seemed to have died when he left the Studio yesterday. Or maybe … when he took the new contract, and got released from the Liaison contract.
One thing Jason knew for certain: Lena would never intend any mind fuckery. That did not preclude there being some mind fuckery happening with her Guardian Contracts. They were operating blind and trying to secure the basics when they took the original contracts, nor had events slowed down since then to really sit down and review what was going on.
"Fuck you, Rob, for bringing up coffee," Jason sighed, rubbing at his face with both hands as implications began tumbling through his mind.
Rob patted him on the shoulder, a touch of the smart ass showing through with some genuine attempt at comfort.
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Rob let Jason wallow in whatever dark thoughts were clamping down on him while he, Rob, handled their public face stuff.
"Having dealt with the creepy bastards that are the Sun Elves so far, I very much understand the city's decision to stay out of that, but, yeah. If the city isn't helping us with some of this stuff, there's not a lot of reason for us to waste your time and ours by bringing it up."
The fox boy came over to their table and asked, "Would you like your breakfast here or in a basket, Sergeant?"
"Here, please," Kargerran said with a nod and a familiar, pleasant smile for the boy.
The kid glanced between them, looking hesitant, but he moved adroitly enough back into the kitchen.
"Now, what's brought up this fear of an Unraveling?" Kargerran asked, the pleasant mask quickly replaced with concerned attention.
Rob held up a finger and chewed at the bite of meat he'd snagged while the sergeant was otherwise occupied. It felt like forever before he could swallow the food, even though he deliberately went for one of the smaller pieces.
"So," he said when his mouth was finally clear again. "The Sun Elves were looking for a way to replace zone control cores for dungeons. Some idiots over in Karth are running around and snagging them from the dungeons. How they're doing it, we don't know. Any how, they figured out how to do that without causing an immediate implosion, but — you were there when we went over the stuff Lena learned from the Tapestry because of her being the Studio's arbitor, right? The whole dungeons are actually mana conditioning zones, taking the Primal stuff and making it safe to replace the mana that leaks out of the Tapestry?"
At Kargerran's nod, Rob continued. "The zone cores, they hold patterns that they stuff the mana into, and those turn into creatures, plants, objects, everything that comes out of a dungeon. These core thieves, they figured out some way to push all these stored patterns out into the mana flow itself. Without a zone core to manage the process, the patterns fill at random, and each of the patterns can only take so much mana so fast. Without someone or some *thing* balancing intake and outflow, the dungeon destabilizes. If its a small enough zone, a new zone core will spawn pretty fast because there aren't a lot of patterns to fill. If it's been around a while, the dungeon will get ejected from the Tapestry when the destabilization passes a certain point."
"Why is that?" Kargerran asked. If his scales weren't lifting, Rob would have said the arassas sergeant had an excellent poker face.
"After the first zone core spawns, no others will. The pattern is restricted by the Tapestry, and only zone arbitors get to spawn them as they like. The cores have to mature to a level where they can handle all the calculations and even just the sheer mana flows they deal with in the larger dungeons. That takes time, usually the same amount of time it took for the original dungeon to get as big as it was when the core goes poof."
Rob speared another piece of meat. "Now, that's pretty much the situation. The mages from the Arcane Asylum that showed up a few days back said things like stagnant weather and stuff are longer term signs of approaching Unravelings. You wouldn't happen to know of a good place to find a reliable guide for touring Malta, and some guards worth hiring on, would you? Maybe some ex-military friends?"
Kargerran blinked, shivered, the movement settling his scales back down. "For the guide, you'd do well to check at the Adventurer's Guildhouse. If you need more than a squad, Val'Melnroe would likely be happy to introduce you to the Mercenary Guild representative in town. We don't allow mercenary companies within the walls."
Rob nodded. He had been present when they found out just how highly parandrians regarded anyone with a [Champion of Order] design, and as Lena's known associates, some of that cachet rubbed off on them. Val'Melnroe was a parandrian stag with an epic rack, ten points and as tall as his own torso.
The fox kin server returned with a platter of seared meat shavings and a steaming cup of broth, which he placed in front Kargerran.
Rob took some comfort in seeing the sergeant nearly inhale his food. Some truisms of military life held, even across dimensions or universes or whatever separated the Grand Tapestry of Rhofhir from Earth.