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Save Point: Restricted Entry

Filling out paperwork on the Rama Empire border. Lots of paperwork.

"Don't gloat," Cleo orders the officious nuisance who is busily stamping things with various inks. "It actually wasn't your first strike which got us, you know, regardless of what your government may have done to take the credit. Speaking of which, you might want to let them know we're here, because I'm certain they'll want to talk to us."

Fingerprinting is interesting. Cleo's partially padded fingertips yield a distinctly uncategorizable pattern, and it's just lucky Sethkill hasn't come along because the argument over which one is the primary thumb could conceivably have lasted all day. Terrownes fingerprints prove to contain all manner of encrypted patterns that are different each time, as he channels a tiny trace of Dragon through his fingertips and samples the wider space of all possible gripping surfaces.

It's an entirely redundant exercise, of course, because the nanotech integrated into their bodies includes a simple cleanup routine that activates once flesh separated from the whole is no longer alive. Their fingerprints eat themselves, after a tiny while, and spilled blood self-destructs. Limbs and severed fingers last a while at minimal function, in case their owner can push them back into their original place to save some time, then dissolve swiftly.

It's possible, in fact, to get the nanotech to consume the entire body if you get killed, and this was the standard procedure during field operations back when Cleo was with the ADF, if they couldn't recover the remains. But she's not going to mention any of this in front of busily paperwork-filing nobody who keeps stubbornly trying to collect her prints. (It took her a lot of effort to ensure that the feature was entirely disabled when she left the service).

The pads of her fingers are solid black by the time someone with half a clue places a few calls to get things goings. They've tried their very best to be non-confrontational about it, but this is just getting silly.

The primary entry form is simply a delight. It includes no less than fifty pointless questions such as 'Do you have any chemical, biological or radioactive weapons in your possession?' (Terrowne writes 'No, but if I did I probably wouldn't tell you') and 'Have you ever considered suicide?' (Cleo writes 'Not until I had to fill out this form').

It also covers a vast assortment of other topics, half of which don't simply apply to them properly because the form has been designed entirely around a series of blind assumptions totally centrist to the local prejudices of the Empire. Racial group and social class are hard to fill in when you're a mixed-blood lioness, and preferred religious practice poses tricky existential issues for a dragon, leading to a certain economy with the truth becoming a must under the circumstances.

Eventually they come up with something sufficiently close to an acceptable list of answers, many of which are under categories marked 'other' or 'please provide additional details.' After a quick debate they decide that they are both 'private security contractors' (because it looks better than 'unemployed mercenaries') and that they are here on business.

Then there's the scanning and declaring of gear. It turns out to be fortunate that Cleo emptied her 'borrowed' clip of special bullets back in Uruk, because they insist on pulling it out and running it through a primitive x-ray along with everything else (the music-player alone is spared, as an item of consumer electronics). There is another elaborate form to fill in for all potentially dangerous weapons, which ironically allows you to walk around armed to the teeth provided that you have formally declared the items. It appears that it is perfectly legal here to carry around a long sword, compound bow, or even an assault rifle as long as you walk about with it openly strapped to your back and it's not actually concealed.

It goes without saying that this makes no sense at all from a practical point of view. The whole idea seems to be that only those who can afford expensive weapons and fill in paperwork should be allowed to go armed, thus presumably keeping the rabble suitably in check.

~*~

"One of things you need to know here is that the Rama Empire has a different style of leadership from Azatlan," explains Cleo, weaving her way through the crowd against the thong and ignoring looks both threatening and admiring. "We used a system of client and subject states, whereby we conquered the major cities and trade hubs for the areas we wanted to keep under our control. They then maintained order in those regions on our behalf, and as long as things stayed peaceful and wealth kept coming up the chain, we didn't bother taking it any further."

"The Rama Empire, on the other hand, prefer to invest in force and also impose their own culture on the areas they obtain access to. There are two main reasons for this. They're numerous, which means lots of spare if poorly trained troops and an ongoing impetus to seize more lands and more territories. Secondly, it acts as an effective long term denial measure against our own strategy. We don't want to invest in force, it is exhausting and expensive and risks their capturing of advanced technologies we want to keep out of their hands... forgive the present tense, I'm quoting one of the better lectures I was subjected to in the ADF. They on the other hand do not care how many basic mortars and crappy machine guns we collect every time we decisively kick their ass, or how many second-rate second sons catch a bullet.

"The reason this matters is that it explains pretty much everything you see around here. They're thronging and numerous, adherence to culture is king, and although their Empire is vast and has many far-flung regions, it's kind of the same everywhere in ways that aren't even readily apparent to the people, they just instinctively act that way based on having always done exactly the same as they see everyone else doing. This is why we were against the Empire - it's more ideological than anything else, we saw them erasing other nations and making of them just more of the same. We conquered stuff, but we didn't expect you to like us and would go away as long you stayed quiet and gave us your lunch money, that being whatever rare resources we needed that weren't readily available at home."

"So we were bullies but they were bigots?"

"Pretty much, yeah."

~*~

"What else?.... uh, the actual name of the country is Melhua," she adds, pronouncing it softly like Mel-hwa, or maybe Mal-wa. "But everyone from everywhere else just calls it the Rama Empire, because it has traditionally been, and still is, run by an arrogant and touchy warrior-caste nobility.

"They've been trying to knock off Azatlani technologies ever since the two nations collided back in the time of Raam the whatever, and our ancestors impressed his ancestors with complicated and exotic foreign ideas like learning to write stuff down. Unfortunately for them we've always been a little bit ahead, and by the time they caught up we always had something else.

"Their current high point is a few successful experiments with stolen nanotech samples that they 'borrowed' from us by various cloak and dagger means, but they either aren't aware or don't have the technology to realize that you need to customize things to the genetics of the user to get any really good results. They're obsessed with duplicating our full immortality technique, but the best they've managed so far is a sort of generic life extension treatment called 'soma' or 'som-ra' which seems to have been derived from medical repair nanotech scavenged off a battlefield after they got lucky once. It was meant as a patch, not a fix, and they don't have much of it, so they retain the entire supply for their nobility and a few indispensable members of their scholar-caste.

"That's not to say they've completely failed, of course. Their current leader, Raam the gods-only-know-how-many, survived an assassination attempt by cutting his own wrists to get a sample of his blood, then slathering it on an ancestral bow displayed near the throne to commemorate the war-deeds of one of his illustrious predecessors. The bow was total rubbish, but his blood killed the hell out of the attacker, who was augmented to the teeth with all sorts of enhancements. Guy was probably ex-Azatlani stealth-ops, hired by one of the many factions in the court to speed up the succession to the throne of one of any number of individuals. So it would be a mistake not to assume that the higher ranking members of the warrior-caste may be more dangerous than they appear, although they're not quite immortal.

"For my money, their best effort would probably be the elite imperial guard, all of whom have a standard augmentation suite swiped wholesale from a local species of snake called a 'naga', which they seem to have managed by copying a specific individual who had Ramanae ancestors and had upgraded himself using a standardized template requiring minimal customization. They must've stalked the poor guy for years and thrown freebies and hard-sell sales-pitches at him until he got the exact set of stuff they wanted to copy. Who knows how many other candidates there were that they gave up on after they did something a little more individual.

"So, the naga all have exactly what you'd expect. Ruggedized scaled skin instead of proper dermal armour, yellow eyes that are purely cosmetic except for basic thermal vision, hyperflexive joint sets everywhere that make them look kind of slithery, too many ribs along the length of the torso and way-showy poisonous fangs. Basically, they're just like you, only lame."

Terrowne grins and shoots her a quick flicker of Dragon tongue, forked at the end, that no-one else in the passing throng sees. She loves what he does with that tongue.

"I fought a couple of them once, on some sort of misguided incursion thing that went wrong, and they were actually quite tough," concedes Cleo, possibly playing it up for fun and jealousy. "Bullets weren't much use, at least not standard ones, so I grabbed them, broke their spines to slow them down and then smacked them into stuff until they finally quit. That got me some real respect... and also a couple of days in the sickbay while the poisons wore off. Fortunately I was able to talk Splatterbunny and Mitzi out of psyching each other up into shooting them.

"We left them strapped up with some of those industrial cable tie things that are designed to hold up about ten tons, because we'd never have gotten them home in one piece. We figured that if we tied them up at a sharp enough angle that their spines couldn't grow back together, they wouldn't be getting out again until after we were long gone.

"We might be able to play on that now, if we're lucky. Those guys are probably still around, and maybe even in charge of stuff by now. It all really depends just how much I offended their twitchy sense of honour by beating them, versus how grateful they are not to be dead... also possibly just how much it hurts to be cable-tied with separated vertebra. If I can manage one of two by making it up to either of them with my ample charms, well, we're in good."

~*~

Which is how they wind up, many fetid and overcrowded bus and train rides later, on the front doorstep of a very average looking suburban house. There's a small shrine to the side of the door with joss sticks still smouldering, and Cleo performs a small homage before it with clawed fingers bent one overtop the other, apparently seeing no reason not to honour the local custom.

Down the road a short way is a conspicuous loiterer with a familiar face, who has been with them on every single bus and train they took, presumably ordered to keep an eye on them. They could probably have shed him like a worn snakeskin, but there really seemed no reason to.

Strange things happen, under the skin of the world, as Cleo well knows, having seen parts of the game firsthand. It used to be operatives of the Rama Empire against agents of Azatlan, in the main capitals and in the remote provinces, but now it's just them visiting a former soldier who these days keeps himself well out of the way. Supposedly.

It takes no extra insight from her to know that they would be unlikely to simply put someone like that out to pasture, even after a slightly embarrassing case of broken spine. Above a certain level of enhancement, everything heals eventually. She would guess that this 'retired soldier' keeps to regular hours at some sort of 'government job' for 'a little extra money.' He probably owns a home free and clear, and is always willing to pay for drinks for any talkative type who might happen to wander by the local bar, keen to discuss politics and public opinion.

It is in short a meticulous cover, so why spoil it? She knocks politely. Terrowne hangs back, since she's kind of the point of their visit, and toys with their watcher by always seeming to be about to approach him for some reason, but never quite doing so.

~*~

Cleo knocks politely. Nothing happens. She slaps the hanging chimes next to the door and they ring out, brass clashing on brass, but to no avail. After a couple of minutes she knocks again.

Eventually, just as she's considering wandering around the back of the building in a shamelessly premeditated invasion of privacy, the door opens, revealing a skinny, aging but remarkably well preserved man with deeply browned skin, wearing a truly ridiculous green uniform.

He eyeballs her skeptically for a second, then declares, "Oh, it's you," in disappointed tones when recognition finally dawns. "I suppose you'd better come in," he sighs reluctantly.

Cleo sight-checks the door for any particularly blatant traps designed to mess up intruders, then nods that Terrowne should follow her in. Inside, it's a very average-looking if well appointed and unusually clean Rama Empire suburban home.

"Dude, seriously, that uniform?" is the first thing Cleo exclaims, the instant the door's been closed behind them. She's speaking idiomatic Ramani, of which she picked up a certain amount during her earlier career, but it makes her sound quite different when he mentally translates it.

Terrowne takes his chance to eyeball the uniform in question, for which 'ridiculous' is a kind and gentle understatement. It's like a sort of green, fully scaled snake-leather corset designed to clasp tightly around the ribs, in a manner that could only be pulled off by someone extremely thin and impossibly flexible to begin with, specifically someone with the naga augmentation suite.

The main cuirass terminates underneath the armpits without providing any sort of decent guard for the shoulders, although the front flares upward and outward a little higher to create a sort of v-shaped collar. Decorative spars made of some black gloss-coated material wrap around the ribs from the back where they originate at the spine, the whole trying to look like the skeletal remains of a snake after professional sandblasting and an airbrush job.

At the hips, there is a token gesture to protection in the form of several layered plates either side that look like the missing spauldrons have been relocated lower on the torso, and then the central spine continues downward into an utterly gratuitous tail that serves no real defensive purpose. It all appears exist solely in order to emphasize the concept of snake, snake, snake. Token strapping over the shoulders is the only thing keeping its owner from lying down and slithering straight out of it, possibly to escape the embarrassment.

"It's my official dress uniform," replies the naga, gritting his teeth. Very long and thin teeth. "I was just at a meeting and I had to wear it. I only just got back, which is why I am still wearing it..... why in the lower hells am I even explaining myself to you? The last time I saw you, you dislocated both of my shoulders and tied me to some sort of industrial fitting!"

It is worth noting that his reply is in rather cultured Azatlani. It seems Cleo is not the only one to have picked up a few tricks.

"I'm sorry, but you've got to go take that thing off before I can take you seriously. It looks like you should be tied to the foot of a very angry young womans bed."

The naga grins and then inexplicably humors her, darting briefly off into a side bedroom with an uncanny agility and somehow managing to discard his snakeskin in well under a minute. When he reappears, he's wearing a loose shirt of the kind common throughout the Rama Empire and looks a lot less creepy, if one is able to overlook the serpentine eyes and excess teeth.

"So, why ya visiting?" he asks with some mocking patience. "Would you like some tea, maybe? Or perhaps the kitty would like some milk in a saucer?"

"Yes, I would love some tea," replies Cleo brusquely, probably hoping to catch him off guard. "And if you can stretch to some milk, that would be great. I expect elite warriors like you can probably afford their own cow. Any preferences, Terrowne?"

"I am very important. I have two cows," hisses the naga ironically, holding up two fingers. "Let me boil some water, just in case I need something to throw at you."

~*~

Cleo is exaggerating the primitivity of the Ramanae, of course. Their host has all the basic kitchen fittings you'd expect, an electric kettle and a sturdily built and boxy refrigerator that shows all the over-engineering of early attempts at a technology. There is chilled milk in a robustly recyclable round glass container with a rudimentary foil cap, and moderately clean piped water.

As the naga busies himself making some tea, Cleo keeps up the weirdly aggressive conversation, which seems to have become a thing. It's probably a bit hard to be casual when a first impression involves major spinal injuries.

She's told Terrowne the guys name, obviously, because she saw it on his identification back when she was tying him to stuff and it was quite distinctive, which is how she tracked him down in the first place. However, whenever Terrowne tries to say it, there are awkward pronunciation issues, possibly stemming from the same accidental modifications that rendered him unable to whistle at the slight expense of being resistant to swallowing corrosives.

Accordingly, he has decided to try and avoid actually saying the guys name if he can help it. Some words are just a bad idea and it is best to work around them. Having a dangerously hot cup of tea handy will probably assist the matter by providing valuable diversion.

"So. At this very moment, the higher echelons of your government are probably still having a bit of a panic attack at the fact that, having heroically managed to take us out with an impossible first strike, they are actually taking the credit for something they didn't do. But of course, being just a retired soldier, you wouldn't know anything about that."

"We vigorously failed to discuss the issue at the meeting I was just at, as a matter of fact," notes the naga, snake eyes weighing tea leaves and small pinches of assorted spices drawn from a whole row of small, cursively labeled wooden draws as he brews up a storm. Mixing ingredients seems to be something he enjoys, possibly because it gives him a chance to indulge his rather disturbing dexterity in a socially acceptable way. "It would be a little troubling to think that there was some totally unknown third party that suddenly appeared from nowhere with those sorts of resources. Of course, we have our own troubles. The Rama Empire is basically a subcontinent worth of small angry feuding kingdoms, nailed together into several large territories. Each and every one has its own group of separatist rabble-rousing bandits, all of whom hate everyone else and will go to any lengths to pry their own starving patch of dirt away from foreign rule, meaning the next city over. And now some of them have nukes, and some of them have been radically emboldened by Azatlan getting erased. A first strike used to seem like instant suicide, but now it's the decisive action of a bold man against an external threat."

"We know who did it, and we can provide certain limited proofs," hedges Cleo, accepting a cup of the finished tea, which as promised is rich in milk and spices and smells amazing. Terrowne gets his own mixture, which is light on the milk and heavy on the tea, almost dangerously scalding. He downs some without a second thought and breathes steam out over his tongue.

"You're very brave, drinking up tea brewed up by an old enemy with a grudge," suggests the naga slyly, apparently trying to mess with them.

Or maybe it's a double bluff, just to trick them into being at ease.

"Mm.. some sort of datura extract?" considers Terrowne, working the splayed tip of his tongue up against the roof of his mouth and letting the secret senses of the Dragon determine what is in it by direct knowledge of the contents. "Something to make us, not weakened, just more susceptible to suggestion? Perhaps a little more willing to answer your questions? I like it, it has a tingly sort of aftertaste."

"He's the scary one," explains Cleo, in response to their hosts unanswered question. "I'm just the cute harmless kitten who likes to break things."

Since neither of them seems in the least bit worried by what they're drinking, this leaves the naga without a suitable rejoinder. He sips some of his own tea, which contains far fewer drugs, mainly as a play for time. He may, horror of horrors, have to be honest with them.

"We would be ....interested," he suggests. "What are you asking for in return?"

"Nothing much," suggests Cleo, with deliberate vagueness. "Maybe that you now treat us as being on your side again, let bygones be bygones? Perhaps you let us play with some of those captured Azatlani toys that you've accumulated over the years, which I know all about?"

"What, you want to defect or something?"

"You can hardly defect once your side doesn't exist anymore. No, we want to join up, because now it's all of us, versus them. We can point you in the right direction and you can help us get revenge for what happened. We're a convenient deniable asset, especially if you were to equip us with any stray Azatlani gear that might just happen be lying around."

"We could ....consider that," concedes the naga, after a certain amount of hesitation.

"See, you're warming up to me already," smiles Cleo. She has more teeth and they are bigger.

"We'd need to hear your story first. Without proof, it could just be anything you made up... but of course, that means you can tell it up front without really giving away any advantage," suggests the naga. "Maybe just give us the basic details as an act of good will?"

"Someone always has to take their clothes off first," nods Cleo, applying a touch of her preferred negotiating advantage. "You were good enough to shed that dreadful armour, so I'll go next."

~*~

It was, of course, never going to be easy to explain that the opposition aren't even proper visitors from outer space, rather that they're from a version of this world so very different as to effectively be an alien world in its own right. Skepticism is a given. The phrase 'they're not from around here' seems to be the most tactful available opening line, but is still bandied around a bit before they're allowed to continue, on a strictly theoretical, if this happened to be true sort of basis.

"Like I'd believe that. This is a put-up job."