TIME August 16th, morning LOCATION The Section House, then the streets of Chuza
BACKGROUND:
Kor-En had backed down over custody of Varan and the githyanki dead – for now.
But two Agents were missing overnight amid a wave of deliberate fires, and Chuza’s newest visitor still had a great deal of explaining left to do.
WHAT HAPPENED
Krusha found himself, somewhat against his will, the Section House’s resident expert on ‘alien visitors’ – a role he hadn’t asked for and wasn’t entirely qualified for, fielding questions from a growing crowd of curious Agents.
Word came in of a second wreck on the far side of the park, this one larger, its occupants human-sized but somehow indescribable to every witness who’d seen them up close.
While those further away reported the same figures walking straight past nearby citizens without provoking so much as a glance.
Varan, questioned further, confirmed the shape of what Chuza was now facing.
A githyanki raiding force had boarded her ship hunting for something specific, grown fixated on this world in particular partway through interrogating her crew after some message reached them, and would not be the last of their kind to come looking.
Whatever they wanted, her captors made clear, they intended to have it – the planet ravaged, its people kept for food and labour, if the githyanki turned their full attention here the way they already had once before.
She thought ‘brain eaters’ had been aboard the same ship, though she’d never seen them herself, and knew of no armour or ward that stood up to one – a claim Krusha, through some awkward translation of his own, tried unconvincingly to counter by insisting he’d already beaten one.
She seemed genuinely puzzled that Chuza kept such things around without being enslaved by them, and more puzzled still that the Agents were free to walk its streets at all.
The spiral tattoos on her face, she made clear when Krusha asked, weren’t decoration – they were slave markings, and no amount of scrubbing had ever taken them off.
Brin, still more focused on gang war and missing Agents than a doomsday warning, agreed to at least float the problem past Lord Morden.
And to that end, greenlit calling in the last two Tol Kerrate Knights left standing, DikDik and Akatha C’Dartris, to make the case together.
The third of their old order, Andros, remained exactly what he’d been for years now: missing, presumed dead.
Out on patrol and still watching for any word of the missing pair, Raven worked the food stalls along the way.
Mostly nods and shrugs, until one vendor placed Agents Black and Pool passing by the night before, around nine.
On patrol, Ash noticed a run of boarded-up shopfronts – two days old at most – and missing coraman crystals along Jewellers Row, more likely aftermath from the previous day’s riot than anything new.
Then a shop door shattered outward ahead of them, and a young woman – Jen, the jeweller Lyall’s daughter and assistant – went sprawling across the cobbles, and didn’t get the chance to rise again before a boot caught her and left her still.
The man who’d thrown her stood over her, very pale-skinned with a scarf pulled up over his mouth and nose, studded leather plates visible at his shoulders under a hooded dark grey cloak, reeking of spearmint beneath the sweat, laughing with a manic, unhinged edge that had nothing to do with the situation being funny.
None of the three robbers – dressed alike, every one of them pale and scarved the same way – wore a cord or colour Krusha could place – not Northside, not Blue Thumb, not any gang working this stretch of the city that he knew of.
Ash’s order to stand down only made the warhammer man laugh harder.
And reach for the weapon with every intention of using it.