TIME August 15th (continuing) LOCATION Garden Row, Chuza
BACKGROUND:
A woman had just fallen out of the sky in a scorched metal pod, warning that something was coming for her.
And a second, much larger impact was already screaming down toward the same street.
WHAT HAPPENED
The second impact tore straight through a building on the park’s edge, trapping citizens on a collapsed upper floor.
Krusha dragged a table across to the collapsed stairwell as a makeshift ramp and talked the trapped down to it one at a time while two githyanki soldiers emerged from the same wreckage behind him – armoured in an articulated, scale-patterned breastplate that looked grown into the body rather than strapped over it, their noses pushed back flat above wide, slitted nostrils.
One barely broke stride asking where
‘his master’
was;
the other only wanted to know where
‘she’
was, then told him to get out of the way.
Krusha let them past without a fight – they weren’t interested in him.
Their captain came through the smoke a moment behind them and wasn’t so easy to wave off.
He looked Krusha over with open contempt, and when Krusha tried to slip past him back into the building anyway, opened his arm with a dagger for the trouble – an almost bored afterthought that didn’t break the githyanki’s own stride, and didn’t follow up.
They found her fast.
A githyanki commander, Greezeg T’ai by the name stitched into his gear – there was no other word for what he was – blinked across the street in an eyeblink, hissed she’s mine, and cut the fallen woman’s throat before Raven could reach her.
It cost all three of them: Raven’s first furious flurry of blades dropped one of the two soldiers from the building outright, Ash’s fire caught the second.
And Greezeg himself, shrugging off Ash’s attempt to break his mind, though taking real damage in return – held out through a last exchange of blades before a final volley of fire bolts finished what the rest had started.
Raven decapitated all three corpses as a matter of standard precaution.
The woman – Varan, as she gave her name once Krusha got her breathing again – survived her own throat being cut, though only barely, and made straight for the dead commander’s corpse and his silver sword the moment she had the strength to move.Back on her feet, she needed only a moment with Greezeg’s body before claiming his silver sword for her own.
She warned Ash off touching the dead soldiers’ armour with nothing but a gesture – the international sign for that explodes.
Ash got further reading the vambrace logo instead, translating the unfamiliar script well enough to make out its sentiment if not its exact grammar:
death before dishonour.
Sam met them back at the Section House to take Varan’s statement properly.
A scout ship, an ambush by the same githyanki, her father and crew tortured and killed while their captors grew increasingly, alarmingly fixated on this specific planet rather than on their prisoners.
She’d used the distraction to grab a lifeboat and a sword she still didn’t know how to use properly.
A second, larger crash site on the park’s far side raised stranger questions than it answered – the nearest witnesses oddly unable to describe what they’d seen at all, while others, further off, described human-sized figures running straight past nearby citizens with no reaction from either side.
Sam had results on the dried gore from Krusha’s own clothes before she had results on anything else: feline blood, laced with proteases consistent with digestive fluid.
Not a wound.
Vomit.
Sam had one more thing for Krusha before she went in to see Varan – a print pulled from the recovered camera, showing DikDik near the Northside Crew building the night of the Scrapshell raid.
Krusha was certain he hadn’t been there.
It would turn out to be exactly that: a coincidence, DikDik having simply been in the area that evening for reasons of his own – but nobody knew that yet.
The rest of the day’s patrol turned into crowd control of a different kind – a sudden, coordinated wave of looting aimed specifically at Coraman crystals, chanted for as much as grabbed, with opportunistic thugs using the cover of the crowd to break into shopfronts and settle older scores.
John Kraven caught Krusha between calls, still chasing his ‘Chuza Converse’ story, wanting to know if it was true that people had fallen from the sky.
By the time the patrol wound down, short-staffed and exhausted, even a few hours’ sleep back at the Port Inn felt earned.
Overnight brought a confrontation nobody had scheduled.
Sorcerer Kor-En – another Dranathess agent, and by uncanny coincidence another double of Overseer Kaleb – arrived at the Section House demanding custody of both Varan and the githyanki dead.
Brin, parchment in hand, refused him outright, stabbing the rolled document straight into Kor-En’s waiting hand.
“Sorry, Kor-En, the sky woman is staying here. You can take the corpses in, ohh, a couple of days. Hope it’s not too ‘inconvenient.”
As Kor-En read it over, Brin laid out the reasoning plainly:“Our governance is Chuza and its citizens. She has done nothing wrong but is in danger and seeking asylum. So I’ve requested transfer to a safe house – as you well know, it’s standard protocol for a foreign diplomat.”
Varan was, by his own paperwork, a diplomatic asylum case, outside martial jurisdiction entirely, and the corpses needed ‘testing for contamination’ that would conveniently take two full days.“A war is coming… and you do this!”
Kor-En, before withdrawing
EXTRAS.
OPEN THREADS
- Varan has taken asylum at the Section House – a genuine off-world survivor, by every indication.
- Kor-En’s parting words – ‘a war is coming’ – echo Skarr’s own account of Krell.
- The second, larger crash site’s occupants were seen by some witnesses and seemingly not perceived at all by others – cause unknown.
- Two Agents, Black and Pool, failed to sign back in overnight amid a wave of suspicious fires along western Section 18.