"If I believed point C, I would be much more likely to apologize for the presumption.  As it is, my 'problem', as you so eloquently put it, is that I do not believe point C.  That little story you were telling to your friends sounded rather too relevant.  So I corrected a necessary detail, and offered some advice.  Assuming you don't want to drive folk into Tower's arms, hm?"

"I don't fucking care about Tower. Buzz off, tourist."

"Tower cares about you; seems a bit boneheaded to not care about it.  But have it your way."

Off she looks like she's going.

(She is not going.  It's harder to send a mirror image meandering off stage left while she's also blurring herself into the walls...but she's good at this.)

"Bitch."

He glares after her, texts `ag ttyl` to someone, and goes and gets a burger. And then eats it and doesn't obviously plot anything.

Well, she'll go follow Matteo around a bit, then.  Make sure those punks don't do the stupid thing anyway.

She knows Choristers all too well, they will absolutely do the violent and stupid thing given half a chance and boy do they.

Nah, something's fishy with this mark. Not worth the risk.

Mateo gets back to the checkpoint area without issue, sticks his helmet back on, and starts gabbing with the guards there, looking guilty and frustrated in body language.

Hmm.

Anything in particular coming up in that conversation?

He winces every time one of the others jokes about bribes, 'muties', or casual violence.

Saaaaaay. Do her illusions happen to also cover millimeter wave RADAR, infrared, and UV scans? Plus some similarly exotic stuff? Because she's either hanging around in eavesdropping range, or being illusioned near a lot of Tower's sensors.

Why shouldn't they?  It's not like they don't know Beastfolk see strange colors.  If anything, it seems like their radar coverage just kind of petered out for a bit right here.

Still, she's heard all she needs to hear.  She'll wander back to the bar, she thinks.  Let them know Mateo's off safe, and he seems to be genuinely thinking.

The console is flagging an anomaly, but it's probably just some sort of weird glitch? Still, better safe than sorry. After a while, several Tower guards look over in her general direction. One of the drones flies down to almost exactly where she is standing to check things out.

It's interesting, that they noticed her.  She wonders how.  Well, she's not going to overhear anything useful, she thinks - so they can have an inconveniently conveniently disappearing anomaly perhaps a bit sooner than she'd otherwise like.

Back to the bar, she thinks.

The anomaly retreated when investigated. An infiltration attempt! This definitely seems like something to pass up the chain!!

The second woman is gone, and Val is sitting inside. Behind the bar, actually. There's salsa music playing from a boom-box bracketed to the ceiling.

"Hey, no trouble in here," Val comments. "I don't want to hear it, no. And you gotta buy drinks if you want to hang, or have a good story to tell."

Other figures in the bar include:

Two white-and-black face guys like the ones who threw booze at her earlier, though not members of that specific group. Drinking and complaining about fuel prices.

One woman smoking a joint with a single spike slotted in her head, looking rather out of it and just chilling. She has a metal hand.

Two different tables of ragged guys and gals playing cards and shooting the breeze; The current scuttlebutt is that Tower kid (fuck Tower, seriously), and how it's actually pleasantly cool today, for summer, and did you hear that one guy cooking up meth blew himself up, that's what you get for sampling your own product.

There wasn't anything there, is the thing, which investigation revealed.  So it probably is just a weird glitch.

(Is what she'd say, if she were hovering over their shoulders and knew more about the system.)

"Nah, no trouble, just thought you might want to know Mateo got where he was going safe enough.  Some punks were dissuaded from giving him a bit of trouble; he's already gotten the memo, y'know?  Can practically smell the smoke comin' out of his ears from thinkin' so hard about it.  Sendin' it again so soon 'll just piss whoever gets the duplicate off, and I've never been a fan of using fists where words'll do, anyway.  Don't reckon he'll darken your door like that again, 'less it's desperate.

"A-ny-way.  Have I got a story...

"...Damn, my life really doesn't do a lot of featuring me as the protagonist.  Much prefer a good mentorship role, honestly.  Or haranguing someone who's being a proper idiot.  Suppose I could talk about the dumbasses who thought they could dissect someone to get the secrets out, but a lot of that shit's just too distant from to hit home right even then.  How much indulging my people-watching habit can I get for..." She consults the folded-up dollar bills, "three bucks, then?"

The inside of the bar is fairly nice, all told. It's reasonably quiet in here, aside from the music. The furnishings are hardly dusty at all. And cool- A nice spring day rather than a searing summer one.

Val takes the three dollars and fixes her a glass of ice water from under the bar.

"I think the memos get caught by his spam filter, hon. You can stay a while, I'll let you know if your welcome's wearing thin, and it goes a bit faster if you're not actually drinking."

The bloodshot-eyes lady Ophelia encountered earlier comes into the bar, wearing a T-shirt in addition to her mesh thing now, and rather filthy on closer inspection, and slaps four dollars down on the counter. "Washroom?"

Val frowns and pockets the cash quickly, replacing it with a cold beer bottle. "This a bar, not a street stall. I saw you stumbling around earlier. The showers are down by the market, head."

"...Got a nanite shot. I'm good now."

"And you immediately came to get drunk again, huh?"

"No, I'll save it, I'm - Just - the toilet and to wash my face."

"...Door on the left. I'll remember you if my bathroom's fucked up later."

"Thank you."

Off she goes. Val sighs.

"Tough job, carin' 'bout people," she murmurs.  "Feels like it never ends, huh?  'specially with the big men in their towers, trampling over the little people."

She sips her water, slowly.  Watches where the lady in the mesh shirt went.  "On the other hand, the opportunities to make miracles happen...Sometimes they're worth the effort.

"...Wonder what could've happened with her, if she's feeling like she needs the privacy."

"You ain't fooling me with that stupid accent. You have to watch your own back, not someone else's. Not that I want to talk about it or anything."

"Bad trip, I think," one of the card-players comments as he walks up. "Another round for the table, please."

Val starts fetching bottles.

"Meth addict. I've seen her around. Name of Reilly. I don't know the full story, but any of us could be her, honestly. And it's worse out here than in the slums- I mean, I've got a steady line of work at the fuel plant, but plenty don't. I don't know if Tower has her blacklisted or she's avoiding someone or what. That's bordertown life."

"Not tryin' to fool.  Just figured it'd be more comfortable than - well.  The sort of voice I use for proclamations.

"Also, not gonna lie, I am so used to doing that sort of thing that I'm not sure it turns off.  Have to get pretty used to talking in three and a half separate languages at the drop of a hat when your day job is - well, was, my boss - okay actually my boss would probably handle this fine, but my boss's boss ain't here and he ain't gonna be, he'd make a damn fine mess fucking around - but yeah, wrangling gangs you can't just stab because they've got this most important pissant little fuck behind their culture on the one hand, iron-faced soldiers who at least do what you tell them on the other, and a whole city's worth of disputes in need of judgement on the third hand you don't even have, tends to leave your accent sliding around like who-knows-what as you try to improvise juggling.  And then you have the fucker who's been doing all your siege run off and start his own damn gang and your boss's boss tells you he's going to make you bring the whole province crashing down around your ears if you don't kill Mr. Practically Invincible, when come on there have to be better options --"

She cuts herself off with a firm shake of her head.

"Somehow I survived that shit, but the reward for attempting the impossible was, in this case, having what I'm pretty damn sure was my boss's boss decide to make me responsible for getting the aforementioned pissant little fuck himself and the soldiers' big man to sit down, play nice, and stop tripping over the sort of thing that should not have been even a roadbump to their powers combined.

"Called in the locals and threw the pissant under the cart instead.  Proudest moment of my career.  No chance to see how it played out before my attempt to interrupt the pissant's escape plans went all squiggly and I ended up out here, but I daresay that if someone's still in my shoes, it'll turn out alright.  ...Maybe not Rhogalus, he couldn't or didn't arbitrate his way through an obvious loophole to save everyone trouble, but other than him I like the chances I'd give for even my notes to pull off an 'everyone wins'.  ...Except Nerat.  Fuck Nerat."

"...Damn, I did not mean to say all that.  Guess I needed to get it off my chest.  But yeah.  Get where you're comin' from; there ain't a lot of good people."

"...There's always a bigger fish, they say. And even if there isn't, if the little ones get hungry enough..." The guy shrugs.

Val raises an eyebrow. "Iron-faced? Province? You're a real hoplite or something arent'cha?"

"Or classical theater or something."

The guy's table calls. "Dale! Dealing in?" "Fold!" He shouts back.

"Anyway," Dale says, "Whole bunch of crews murdering each other, it's gonna be hammer down if collectively-you don't get your shit together, stuff happened, the shit is not together, so you nailed one of the players to the wall, Nerat? Then ended up out here. Sound about right?"

"Or something," she murmurs.  "That sounds like it's not a wrong way of putting it, for sure.  Wish I could've nailed him to a literal wall; he deserved it if anyone does."

"This is probably bullshit but it's somewhat entertaining bullshit. So what was so awful about Nerat?"

"He ate people.  Like, 'never found the bodies' ate people.  Part of setting him up to take the much-overdue fall was dragging up some evidence of that.  And like, more prosaically, he was just...

"So my boss's boss, in charge of all this shit, he has a few rules that he enforces harshly, and then he lets the people, like, on the same level of the hierarchy as that guy all run their own little kingdoms so long as they keep to that.

"Except that this little pissant had been around for a long, long while, maybe before my boss even - never really bothered to check - going steadily insane with bloodthirst the whole time - and his little faction, the Scarlet Chorus...

"I'm supposed to judge disputes between factions, in this system, most of the time.  How their rules interact with eachother.  And my boss backs my word to the hilt, that's one of his few additional rules.  But I most often found my grounds for giving the Scarlet Chorus a verbal thrashing, in the underlying laws that my boss's boss declared to be the laws above all others - because near half of Nerat's policies were just directly in conflict with 'em.  Fucking...lateral promotion by bloodsport, by which I mean 'if you murder anyone you run their things now'.  That just isn't right, and even if you take certain interpretations of my boss's boss's exclusive right to kill you, as derogated downwards - it's commonly held to be the foundation of the chain of command of where I'm from, that, though I'd argue that the portion of command implied by Right of Destruction is not affirmatively having to take orders, so much as providing a consequence for their refusal; I wrote a monograph on the duty to obey adhering more distinctly from Archon's Privilege, actually, as part of the legal assault on Nerat's position - anyway, he was still setting up and openly perpetuating a culture that refused to abide by even the most favorable reading of that law, while purporting to obey the whole damn edifice.  Which is fucking idiotic when you know your boss would be just fine with you dead and there's someone who has the authority to say everyone can and should kill you because you've done.  So many crimes, I think I could not count them all.  Waste, waste, waste as far as the eye can see in heavy-handed methods and management by bloodsport and quiet but practically open sabotage of an ally.  And the treason.  I'm pretty sure he was planning treason, and not even just a civil war sort of treason.

"That last meeting, when I had the locals and the proper soldiers and myself sitting down at the diplomatic table -

"Half of it was because I thought the locals and the soldiers and my predecessor in that post had gotten off to a really bad start and I wanted to wipe the slate clean.  Half of it was because I was pretty sure the both of them would unite behind the rallying cry of 'fuck Nerat'.  And he was there, being eminently fuckable, and then we fucked him.  ...Excuse me, that came out wrong."

That was totally intentional.

"Really, though.  He just marched in, started off by declaring the whole exercise of talking a waste of his precious time otherwise spent making garters out of human guts or whatever he does for 'fun', tried to outdo me on the law - idiot - and resorted to literal actual childish insults when everyone else actually took things seriously and he didn't like it.

"Then indisputable evidence of him eating someone Ashe cared about came to the table, and things promptly went even more sideways than - my expectation that he'd get pissed off enough to try something stupid if I called him on his everything so I could declare him persona non grata - had been assuming they'd go.  And now here I am."

Everyone hisses in shock and recoils at the first mention of cannibalism, and the whole bar is paying attention now. It's clearly a taboo, above everything else. A knife gets slammed down into wood when she mentions someone's kid getting eaten, and the guts thing.

Yeah, FUCK NERAT. With a rusty colander. No, with a spinal tap syringe full of the river water. And then pour gas on what's left, burn it, and shoot it some more.

So where was this? Europe? The Middle East, maybe? This shit about Archons and the formal 'right of destruction' and writing fuckin' monographs about it sounds like some sort of religious thing. Especially if it's actually obeyed. Only the guy at the very very top can kill you? Some kind of neutral arbitrator that's actually respected? Yeah, right. Still. Like the serious and formal side of the Triads, sort of.

"Only the guy at the very very top can kill - can have killed - anybody.  Your boss can still kill you.  If my boss had an egregious disagreement with the way I ruled on something he'd throw the court assassin at me and that was legal.

"And I suppose, since I mentioned them, that I can say that - an Archon, according to the law of Kyros, is a person, appointed to a purpose or a principle, by no one other than Kyros themself - and that remit is absolute; while one instance lives there shall be no other, though sometimes a title passes.  I was - am, in spirit, still - a Fatebinder, chosen as hands and voices of the Archon of Justice.

"But yes, you're right that the place where this happened is very far away from here, and very different, too.  Though I look at the corporations and see some strange similarities."