Play Your Part

[Rogrim]

The still unnamed gentleman quickly saw himself out of Isosceles’ shop, not bothering to stop and request any further information. He truly was a strange one. It seemed that he had two distinct personalities. It was almost funny that after strictly hammering out the plan the man had left before even giving him the promised ingredient. Gently cracking open the door Isosceles popped his bright blue eyes outside. He felt as if he was intruding on something personal.
“Um,” Isosceles’ stuttered, “Can I have the ingredient we spoke of so I can begin formulation the compound?”

[Daq Bekkar]

Daq had at first directed his gaze toward Pagusel when she responded to him, but when she tacked on the bit about neither of his personalities being particularly ingratiating, he stared intently at a murky puddle on the ground. Vaguely, he could see his reflection, and the way the strange water seemed to distort everything made it difficult for him to recognize himself. He was disappearing.

He reminded himself that Pagusel hadn't remained for his sake. She had, in fact, remained to do business with Morax. She had no interest in him--she hadn't even thought highly enough of him to heed his warning. So by the time she added that he ought to assert himself over Morax, throwing out the tantalizing, implied hope of her eventually caring for his company if he cared for it himself, he was no longer really convinced of her sincerity. Pagusel, he decided, was manipulating him.

Daq felt Morax lingering quietly, obviously privy to his thoughts, though reluctant to make any move. Moods had always been something Morax tried to stay away from, which is why he associated so fondly with Daq--a subdued man with only a few, predictable moods and an easily defined list of causes for them--and why he associated with Pagusel with such difficulty and obvious vexation. Morax was content to simply let Daq sort things out.

He was content, that is, until Rogrim came out of his shop to ask about the 'ingredient' he'd promised. Morax began to wonder if the gnome was readily acquainted with the application of explosives, rather than just their development. The TATP he had promised was an explosive in its own right, that would simply be used in the detonation of the gnome's own compound from afar. Careful to try to leave Daq at the surface of things, so that Pagusel wouldn't fall into another one of her moods, Morax turned to the gnome and spoke with as much kindness as he could muster. The end result was something that sounded rather flat, almost robotic.

"The compound I promised is not needed for the synthesis of your compound, only its triggered detonation," he said. "Please finish with your preparations, and I will discuss the methods of its employment when we are on-site."

[Pagusel]

Pagusel's gaze dropped further when Isosceles stepped out--she had anticipated his height incorrectly. His bright eyes hovered above the mud. Gnomes all managed to pack so much intensity into their little frames.

The corners of Pagusel's eyes tightened as the gnome spoke, and she let her gaze drift away from him so as to take in his words rather than the awkward, somehow embarrassed expression on his face. The same thoughts formed in her mind as Daq's--maybe Isosceles didn't understand the agreement, or perhaps she herself was unclear on the specifics. Her expression concentrated.

With her vision intentionally unfocused, she peered down at Isosceles again. He could have been a foggy child, like that. Her eyes sharpened again. He was the solid thing in their party. Whether he understood what was going on or not, he was still the most stable being on this particular side street at this hour.

"Yes, friend . . ." The address given to Isosceles was not exactly warm, more of a masonic afterthought. It did more to underscore Pagusel's attitude towards Daq than her actual relationship with the gnome. " . . . Please do gather your things that we may apply them to Mister Bekkar's cause at this remote location. While I will register my preference not to dawdle this morning, I cannot recommend excessive haste. Take your time to ensure your safety . . . or what have you."

Pagusel paused for a few seconds and looked back up at Daq. He looked like himself. She extended her hand and placed her palm flat on his forearm as some sort of unclear gesture. If she was trying to restrain him or offer physical comfort, it was an ineffective gesture indeed. The line of muscle that ran from the base of her slim pinky finger to the bony hump of her wrist rested on his sleeve. This muscle was unusually thick and gave cushion to the one side of her palm. Against the lankiness of the rest of her body, this puffy bit seemed incongruous. It might have been inflamed. The muscle bulged softly as Pagusel bent her fingers like a rusted clasp on Daq's sleeve.

She looked at him for a few moments without anything to say. She came up with something, but Isosceles needn't hear it. Pagusel tipped her chin up to keep anybody below waist level from seeing the movement of her lips. "He will be alright," she said plainly to Daq--the man who looked like Daq. There was hardly any voice to her words at all; just a bit of a whisper. "Will you?"

[Rogrim]

It was by far the oddest array of emotions Isosceles had observed so subtly expressed between these two virtual strangers. There they were, standing in a little group outside his shop, the murky brown and gray colors of the ground and buildings mirroring their somber emotions. The only contrast was Isosceles' shockingly bright eyes, open wide like a childs trying to understand a new type of person. He wished he was better with people, so maybe he would be able to understand a little more of what was being exchanged between the two.

The gentleman spoke to him in a tone completely aside from what he expressed with his body language, "The compound I promised is not needed for the synthesis of your compound, only its triggered detonation," he said. "Please finish with your preparations, and I will discuss the methods of its employment when we are on-site."

Isosceles' bit his lip in thought briefly. TATP. Perhaps it would be better to use that instead of a fuse. Remnants of a fuse might lead back to him, the primary manufacturer and distributor of high grade fuses in the area.

"Yes, friend . . .", Pagusel said, breaking him out of his reverie, " . . . Please do gather your things that we may apply them to Mister Bekkar's cause at this remote location. While I will register my preference not to dawdle this morning, I cannot recommend excessive haste. Take your time to ensure your safety . . . or what have you." There was something to the way she spoke that Isosceles just could not put his finger on.

"Umm, I just wanted to inspect the compound for quality, purity and compatibility. Their is a slim chance it might not be able to ignite the S17, so a small sample is all that is necessary. And I have plenty of S17 ready, it should not be a long process." Isosceles said almost sheepishly, feeling like he was invading on a personal affair.

[Daq Bekkar]

"He will be alright. Will you?"

It was just barely over a whisper, but Morax had no trouble hearing it. He'd always had excellent hearing. As far as he was concerned, he and his hosts were often the very picture of health. Daq knew what was implied by this question, but he didn't feel like answering. Instead, he just sulked sullenly beneath the surface of Morax's consciousness, sharing but not participating. He was in no mood to participate in anything anymore. His thoughts turned to the window in the library. Silke had been there, or at least the memory of her. He wanted to return, but Morax needed him where he was, helping to keep up appearances.

Morax, on the other hand, took the question at face value.

"Of course I'll be alright, Pagusel," he said. To convince her, he grinned broadly, perhaps too broadly, showing almost all of Daq's teeth that, in ordinary proportions, would have looked handsome and large, but in this case looked positively feral. He did, however, manage to resist the urge to lick his lips or suck on his teeth. "Why wouldn't I be?"

Really, though, if anything were to be getting in the way of his being 'alright,' it was the blundering gnome. What else did he need to know about the TATP? The name said it all--it was the structure of the compound!

"TATP," he said, slowly and carefully to contain his annoyance. "Is a very unstable compound. Friction, impact, heating... all of these can set it off, and, trust me, it is very volatile. I would prefer to synthesize it on site. It would be dangerous to carry it around with the explosives, don't you think? Nonetheless, if you insist..."

Morax reached with Daq's right hand into his left breast pocket, pulled out a small glass vial, and hocked a great gob of stringy spit into it. "It's an organic compound," he said. "Which has its advantages."

With his thumb over the top of it, he swirled the tube gently. Occasionally, he would hold it up to his eye or blow on it. This proceeded for a few minutes. Finally, he removed his thumb and a sweet, smoky mist rose from the vial, leaving only an opaque white, crystalline powder at the bottom. Carefully, he stooped down a bit and extended it to Rogrim.

"Careful, now. I think that's more than enough to blow one of your little hands off," he said. This time, he couldn't resist licking his lips.

[Pagusel]

While the man who looked like Daq worked on synthesizing his trade out of spit, Pagusel watched on with almost keen attention. If she was going to respond to his last comment to her--"Why wouldn't I be?"--she would have to pull her attention away from the interesting spectacle.

Pagusel spoke up with awkward timing, not soon enough for her commentary to be obvious. "I see the obtuse one has learned to employ rhetoric," she said into the air in nobody's direction. Her words didn't carry the predictable cadence of irony, as if her speech was self-conscious of its own ineffective placement. "I mistakenly thought only the meek one had mastered the subjunctive mood . . . " She didn't use a biting tone; she spoke as if she were trying out the ingredients of the wordplay context-free, for no audience. But then she looked at Daq and Isosceles in turn.

She shrugged with a backwards roll of a single shoulder. She gave a frown that isolated the smallest lift of the center of her lips and pushed her eyebrows into an almost comically moony expression, with which she gazed off into the foggy sky.

[Rogrim]

Isosceles' watched disdainfully as Mr. Bekkar spat into the small vial he produced from his pocket. Sticking out his hand he very carefully took it from him, worrying more about getting spit on his hand then making the volatile compound react.
"Thanks," Isosceles said slowly, with obvious distaste.

Pagusel gave a strange speech, and Isosceles' took very little from it. With a puzzled look on his face he rethought his initial impressions of her. He was not made to deal with people like this, but he would have to.

"I will begin my preparations immediately, it should not take very long. Should I seek you out somewhere when I am complete or will you be returning later?" Isosceles said with a more neutral and controlled tone.

[Daq Bekkar]

Daq stood up again. Stretching his arms out behind him, he placed his hands firmly on the small of his back and leaned against them, cracking his spine loudly.

"Ahhh..." he said. He finished just in time to listen to Pagusel's oddly delayed reaction, in which she said something about rhetoric and subjunctives. While he knew all about the subjunctive tense and how it was to be employed, Morax still couldn't tell why Pagusel had thought it worth commenting on, or even if she'd been addressing anyone directly. Focusing inward, a bit, he tried to conduct Daq's attention to the comment, but he wasn't interested.

In fact, he'd become rather remarkably inaccessible, just sort of floating there near the surface of things, but not particularly engaged with what was going on. It was almost as if he were completely unconscious, though Morax knew that wasn't entirely the case, since he could still feel his presence. He'd had several past experiences where a rival consciousness had been completely obliterated, and this wasn't like them at all. Whatever the case, Morax was forced to abandon the interpreting of Pagusel's observations.

Isosceles prattled on about his preparations and further waiting times, and Morax paid him little more than half-attention. Mostly, he focused on Pagusel, looking at her with inappropriate directness. She was gazing off into space, and she had a strange look on her face, most similar to what Morax usually came up with when he tried to imitate the expression of a person engaged in thought, except a bit less expressive.

"Well, Pagusel?" he asked. "Should we wait here or should we go somewhere else? I, personally, am feeling a bit peckish, and there's a little gastronomy that Da--err I like to go to when I am shopping in these parts just a few blocks away. We can go there if you'd like."

Morax chided himself briefly for his slip of the tongue, but he didn't really think it amounted to anything much.

[Pagusel]

Pagusel spent her crooner's expression on the blanket of clouds, and let the faint jingle of the gnome's retreat play her gaze back down mudward.

It sounded exactly as if he was about to say "Daq" when he stopped himself. The sentence was all but whole to Pagusel's ears; she knew what she was listening for. Her anticipation of his muddled pronouns negated his belated attempt to cover up.

Perhaps her overly dramatic gaze at the clouds had inspired some streak of staginess in Pagusel, because she responded to his claims of feeling peckish with a bit of wit. "Peck off." She rotated her face away from him and exhaled between her lower lip and her teeth. It would have been a nice time to have something to smoke, the better to punctuate her callous quip.

Pagusel sunk to her haunches. The lowest locks of her bedraggled fur cloak dipped into the custardy mud. Her long toes peeked out from under the hem, softly brown and dusty against the shiny cracked leather of her sandals. A small number of fine, mosquito-colored hairs grew sleekly on the biggest toe of each foot, unmaintained. She rested her forearms on the hidden platform of her knees and touched her fingertips lightly.

Morax hadn't run off just yet, and she looked up. "If Daq would be inclined to bring back a small cup of something warm, some broth or pot liquor, I should be obliged to accept it," she said in a hollow voice. She narrowed her eyes in a way not unfriendly as she watched for the man's reaction to her request, and whether he would take it as a rescinding of her previous retort, or just at face value. She at least had made her point that she didn't intend to go off while they waited for the gnome.

Pagusel looked away from Morax, and it was sudden, in her slow way. She stared beyond the corner of Isosceles's building at the vacant street. After the pre-dawn chaos, this was a quiet morning. While Pagusel had known quiet times and solitude, this city, for all its bawdiness and muffled unrest, had a brand of silence all its own. Pagusel was aware of an emptiness, and unsure of whether this was yet some new place and chapter to add to her experience, or simply a void in which to pawn around. The idea of an impending explosion was intriguing, and--she looked back up at Daq to see if he was off yet--the idea of a terrorist made the morning feel a little less silent, or empty.

[Daq Bekkar]

Morax frowned at Pagusel's response, not upset, only curious. He didn't really understand the wisecrack Pagusel had made, so he also failed to understand that his gesture had been repudiated. He also found it odd that Pagusel was making mention of Daq. Could she see through the disguise of her own accord, or was the human not pulling his own weight? Whatever the case, the jig was up.

"Yes," he said after deciding, ultimately, that there was no sense in maintaining the pretense any longer. "Well, if you don't care to go, then I'd just as well stay here. It's a fair walk, and I'm not the one who needs food, per-se. It's Daq who needs it. His body, rather."

Morax leaned against the side of the lab with one foot propped against the wall and one foot stuck out to balance him. He picked at the walls and sniffed the air with interest. There were so many chemicals. He felt sure there was one he hadn't had the chance to examine before.

"The gnome should be done soon, anyway," he said to no one in particular. He tturned his head to look at the door of the lab. A very mild sort of annoyance compelled him to contort his mouth into a snarl and lick the fronts of his top teeth. Turning to Pagusel, he said. "In all honesty, he should have been done already. I'd thought he'd have the chemical on hand, what with all that talk of its stability."

He didn't exactly know why he'd said it. It just seemed like the right thing to do to him, despite his feeling somehow certain that she wouldn't care. Perhaps this was a bit of social intuition?

He flipped his face away from her and talked to himself under his breath. "All this time with humans..." he muttered.

[Pagusel]

Pagusel hadn't intended to eat this morning, not until she had reverted to her other, more simply maintained form. But, Morax's offer evoked an unexpected train of thought on nourishment--crude, inelegant imaginings, but notions of stock and salt nonetheless. When he rescinded his offer, a strange sensation of disappointment fell on Pagusel's crouched spirit like a peaked veil. She became acutely aware of the weight and dryness of her own tongue.

He evoked something else in her, too. He was making idle talk, as Pagusel stared up at his chin with darkly blank eyes. A few snatches of what he said were, in a way, offensive.

" . . . It's Daq who needs it . . . . he should have been done already . . ." Pagusel's calves shuddered, or rather just twitched, as she nearly stood up to face Morax. She stifled the reflex and pinched the ends of her long hair between her fingers as if to anchor herself by her own trappings.

She swallowed thickly, nothing more than dry heat and the trace of sticky saliva. It was irritating, this feeling of offense and hunger. She focused her gaze on the back of Morax's head after he turned. Daq, whose outward appearance was still there, was beholden to Morax, or perhaps there was some gradient in that relationship. The irritation and nervousness rising in her chest reminded Pagusel that she was beholden as well, but to which, she couldn't decipher.

"What are you, Morax?" she said from her crouched spot in the mud. Her tone was neutral.

[Daq Bekkar]

Turning to look down at the crouching woman, Morax narrowed his eyes and answered her perfunctorily. Hers was a question he'd been posed a number of times before, so he knew immediately how to respond.

"I'm an alchemist, Pagusel," he said. "I thought you'd have figured that out by now."

He turned away from her again and continued leaning, shifting between right leg propped against the wall and left. Finally, he gave up on trying to stand entirely, planted his two feet out and let his back slide down against the wall until the cobblestones stopped his hindquarters' descent. He hunched forward, extending his torso between his legs, and planted the palms of his big hands on the cold stone. He let out a long, high-pitched yawn and stretched out even further, emphasizing the thin, lanky height of Daq's frame--a characteristic that its former owner rarely, if ever, seemed to call attention to.

Morax could feel the tight muscles of Daq's back straining to allow him to occupy his pose, and he surmised that the body would feel sore in a few hours, but that wasn't something that really concerned him. Mainly, he was bored and impatient. Not only did he begrudge the midget's holding things up, he was growing more and more agitated over the cohort he'd chosen. True, he didn't exactly have a knack for manipulation, but he didn't necessarily have to pick a girl who seemed to oppose him at every turn.

There is something to be said for convenience, he remarked to himself silently. He tried his best to wait patiently. That was, of course, Daq's strong point, not his. Despite his best attempts not to fidget, he soon found himself rapping a complicated tune out into the pavement with his long, outstretched fingers, tapping along at opportune moments with the muddy soles of his boots.

[Pagusel]

Pagusel flared her nostrils as she took in the fresh reek of the mud in which she crouched. Morax gave a meaningless answer to her question, but perhaps not useless. She might piece together some sort of communication with him, or with what he was hiding in Daq's body, if she could figure out how he was willing to communicate. It was hard to find a proper alchemist in this town, and she wasn't willing to give up on this mess of a man just yet. Pagusel swallowed quickly as the notion crossed her mind that it was the mess itself that interested her.

The muscles in her back tensed as Morax dropped down to meet her level. He leaned forward in an unnatural sort of way. Pagusel could picture the line of his backbone under his jacket, and she arched her own back in the opposite direction in response. A comfortable sensation of warmth poured down her spine as she stretched. She closed her eyes. Membranous blue veins crossed intricately on her thin, dust-colored eyelids. Behind the fleshy veil, the day's sunlight appeared only as a yellow-red syrupy presence that played a nice, vague background to Pagusel's focus on the pleasing tactile sensation in her muscles.

She heard Morax's tap-tap-tapping as he abused Daq's body, but she didn't shoot him the correcting look she might have. She gazed upward with closed eyes and took this communication for what she could, and found herself grasping at a reverie.

The quiet tapping echoed in her mind. Memory supplemented the mechanical wheeze of a dummy. Taps became the repetitive organic creak of flesh against the dummy. The thing spun and bucked dizzyingly with each blow from the young man. Pagusel backed away from the door of the training room and the sound became muffled in echo.

But there was no echo, and there was no room; Pagusel opened her eyes and reached her fingertips up to touch her lower lip. She took a long look at the door to Isosceles's shop and drew herself to a standing position. Her gaze narrowed and fell on Morax's back. "I think we should go on without him," she said quickly, in her characteristically flat tone. "I'd rather we pull this off between the two of us and not involve another. I'm willing to discuss the specifics of my contribution to your plans if that's what it will take."

Pagusel made a funny shimmy of her hips to straighten the hem of her cloak and shake off a bit of debris. She looked over her shoulder in the opposite direction of the gnome's shop.

[Daq Bekkar]

Morax exhaled with a wheezing, coughing sort of noise and leaned out even more, pushing the limits of how far Daq's spine would allow itself to contort. Fingertips gripping the edge of a cobblestone for leverage, he stretched himself forward until he heard a few satisfying pops from his lower back. Now that he'd assumed some semblance of control over his new form, he was intent on working hard to reverse the damage that years of its former owner's neglect had caused. Restoring its flexibility was at the top of his list.

Inhaling, he straightened up and dragged his feet back in toward his haunches. Shifting into a squatting position that resembled a gargoyle perched at a building's eave, he turned his head to look at Pagusel as she spoke.

"I'd rather we pull this off between the two of us and not involve another."

Morax narrowed his eyes and stared at Pagusel for a few moments before languidly raising himself to his full height.

"You read my mind," he said. Although it was nothing but a common idiom, his words seemed to have suspicious emphasis placed on them. "He's been in there an awfully long time for a man who's supposed to have the compound on-hand. If he's trying to alert the authorities, I'd say that we have no more than a couple of hours to stage our break-in."

He waited for his companion to finish shaking off her robes. Unlike Pagusel, he didn't particularly care what sorts of grime and muck covered his overcoat and his britches. All kinds of chemicals tended to be packed into the industrial sludge of these parts, and one never knew when it could come in handy.

"If you don't mind, I think we mustn't tarry any longer. We should, as they say, make our way to the residential district post-haste."

Morax didn't need to pause to gather his bearings. In his boredom, he'd been sussing out the best way to reach the battlemage's residence, one that was both fast yet furtive. Taking advantage of Daq's long legs, he walked at a pace brisk enough to cause his muddy coat to flap out behind him a little. Before ducking into a side-alley, he called out for Pagusel.

"Come," he said. "I will instruct you en route."

[Pagusel]

Pagusel turned her back on the door in the storefront. Morax agreed with her suggestion they leave, and raised suspicions about the possibility of the gnome as an informant. She exhaled a cool breath, a combination of relief and surprise. She was hoping to protect the blue-eyed little creature from this Morax with distance, but if the gnome were indeed an appendage of the law, she could be protecting herself as well. Daq--or Morax--hadn't exactly been tight-lipped with regards to his self-ascribed terrorism, and a few people here and there in town knew she wasn't quite sympathetic to the City Guard's policies.

What else had Morax said? "You read my mind . . ." Something about his pitch or cadence was still so odd, almost attributable to social ineptitude. Pagusel was grateful not to be a mind reader.

Before he had finished speaking, Pagusel's feet arched with the intent of walking; she didn't yet know where to go. She looked at her companion for direction, who started off with such boldness that she was startled, and hesitated before following.

The soles of her sandals didn't allow her to move as quickly as Morax. She staved off the mild frustration with her footwear by focusing on the perfect levelness of her chin and on ignoring the tickle of a lock of hair that had slipped inside her collar. If Daq's foot wasn't entirely healed by now--through odd forces--then Morax was abusing him this way, for consequences to be felt later. Walking behind a little more slowly helped Pagusel feel she was towing him back slightly, invisibly.

He said he'd instruct her, and then he slipped out of sight. A streak of anger for silly, meek, and possibly entirely absent Daq flared up in Pagusel's stomach. She wished to somehow catch Morax off guard, that this exchange would not slip fully into his control.

Pagusel understood that he claimed not to know what sort of shifter she was. She might be able to surprise him, if such an emotion was in his repertoire. As she approached the mouth of the alley into which he had disappeared, she lifted her hands to smooth back her hair, then slipped into her smaller form in mid-step. The transformation itself took less than half a second and was accompanied by the faintest rustle of air as a bit of breeze fell into place where the human had stood.

The cockroach continued forward and found itself scuttling alongside a few other vermin that took up residence in the nooks around the alley. She did not turn into the invitingly still air of the alley, but rather scurried past the mouth and stopped a few feet on the other side. Pagusel rose up and pushed back her hair again. She attended to an itch near her temple where an antenna had been hosted, and then turned about face.

She took a few large steps to introduce herself into the alley. She was coming from the opposite side Morax had last seen her. The idea of deliberately trying to surprise someone with which she wasn't openly hostile was uncomfortable, and Pagusel kept her gaze lowered so as not to baldly look her companion in the face.