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Save Point: The Dragons Horde

Something seems off about the spelling to him, but he ignores it. The pluralization in the wording for treasure suggests somehow that there are a multiplicity of dragons involved, which makes no sense at all, but he's hardly the authority on Azatlani grammar use.

~*~

Velkos has effetely thin high cheekbones, and broad pointy furless ears that match their outward line, but a pair of stupendously huge boobs that are completely out of character, disproportionate to the rest of her body. Her eyes practically glow a luminescent shade of blue and her small mouth has thick pouting black lips.

The ears are probably just overflow from a whole assortment of minor animal genetic mods, and certainly not out of place in Hybrazeal, where just about everyone has them. What has probably gotten her banished here were a large number of overlapping cosmetic procedures, in pursuit of a perfect body existing only in her own mind and no-one else's, and she's run with it a little to get everything above the shoulders to match.

Her outfit is high fashion by way of an adult supply shop, with big open leather bucket cups at the front to show off her chest, that don't quite come high enough to fully conceal the tops of aureolae that must, by the staining of the skin, be just as dark as her lips. Shoulder side-straps that actually come up around and behind the sides of her breasts provide support, and sheer panels of a finely translucent synthetic plastic of some kind show her shoulders down to the upper arms. She has a lot of heavy looking gold jewelry, upper arm bracelets with odd protruding knobbles of the metal on top that you just want to touch and rub, heavy wrist bracers of the same metal.

She's trying to look light and sleek and artful, like something out of a fashion show, the bracelets something that she has just thrown on, darling. But the effect spoils itself and the look of subdued greed on her pouty lips makes her hard to trust. Not helping is a sort of sheer silk waist-down dress in angle-shifted greens and grays over the corset-like underlayer, accentuated by a draping hip-belt of broad flat gilded panels that hangs low, hooked over an unnaturally slim waist above naturally wide hips, as a sort of pelvic girdle.

Currently she's holding something in a small glass test tube, whilst angling up a small book with a red cover and black-embossed diagrams toward the fixed supply of illumination provided by the light-shaft above, trying to get enough on both to make something out. The glowy blue eyes must be decorative and not confer any real visual enhancements, because Sethkill has seen many of the dimmer corners of the city alive with activity, forms of thermal and photo-multiplication allowing the extensively modified inhabitants to be at ease in low light conditions and get by on the natural light, which is more easeful on the eyes.

"Oh there you are. What kept you?" she exclaims as she sees him, putting down the book behind the small external counter and slotting the tube back into some resting niche. "I've been waiting for you practically all day! Come on, I'll take you out back."

Black talons click on the glass as she opens the fold-up counter.

In the face of this brusque and unexpected reception, Sethkill is a little confused. No-one has said anything as to whether or not anyone knew he was coming here, and while there is possibly a sort of timer on this if the old man was even partly close, no specifics have been offered.

He tries to shrug it off by making small-talk.

"What was with the little glass tube?"

"Assaying. The colour of the liquid tells you how much precious metal is in stuff. It's cheap but quick and it works - unless of course clouds have come over and you can't see the book."

"I'm surprised you haven't had your eyes done again."

"Oh fuck no. All of this," she gestures to herself, "is what got me here. It's quite enough."

~*~

"Strange, isn't she? Kind of mean, but once you get to know her, she has this certain depth... to be quite honest, I don't really love her, but she knows that and she doesn't really love me either. I'd imagine that's true of a lot of couples out there really, but hey... well, you saw her."

"Very weighty on top," Sethkill offers, making a cupping gesture and hoping he doesn't offend.

"Mmmm, I just wanna free those big boobies from their confinement and play kissing games. And she's determinedly self-destructive in the sack. So, what's happening?"

Sethkill suddenly does this peculiar thing that would startle anyone by physically holding the tip of his muzzle shut and making a concussive huffing sound out through his ears.

"Seriously, what was that?"

"That was... what would you call... sneezing."

"That was really weird. Don't do that again."

Sethkill forebears to mention that the thing he just did, although in this case just a clearing of the airways, was once used to call quorum at the social rallies of the hunting-party loving carnivores that were his ancestors. When they were through with the essential greeting ceremonies, the sum of the number of huffs and the rank of those doing the huffing was the incitement to begin, like a discreet cough signaling for silence at the start of the event.

Terrownes back room is dusty, an entirely enclosed space with only one small light-shaft branch diverting from the main one for the place, split up by a square hanging ceiling in the middle of the roof to try and make it more pervasive where it emerges around the edges. It's not enough and so he has an additional up-light mounted in each corner, feeding into the reflected sum of the whole, but the result is still perhaps not well-enough lit for most peoples tastes.

In the center of the room is a wide low display bench, with various additional desks and chests of drawers squeezed tightly around the edges. A lot of dust has accumulated in the unswept corners, probably because the ventilation is run primarily upward through the same openings that exit the light-well. There are no windows to open.

However, the reason for the dust is suggested, in part, by the varied assortment of small tools and clamps and gadgets that he has lying around the place, as well as various items of partially or fully completed jewellery and components of jewellery that are lying around, associated with same. A set of small grinding heads on a flexible cable drive suggests that things get ground and polished here, and that the heavier grit that results is allowed to rest in the corners where it won't become a problem by being stirred into the air again with overly vigorous cleaning.

"Yeah, I know it's kind of a little dim and grimy," concedes Terrowne, interpreting Sethkill's gaze and token sneeze as some sort of implied hint as to the tidiness of the place. "But you have to admit, I keep the rest of the place scrupulously clean and well-lit, considering we're underground."

"You make jewellery?" Sethkill asks, stating the obvious.

"It's more of a hobby than a job," explains Terrowne. "But you've gotta pay the bills somehow and it's worked out quite well for me. I used to steal it in my younger days, now I make it and sell it to people. Gives me a decent idea of what's really worth wearing, and what they just buy to show off or put in their safety deposit box."

"That's quite a hoard you've got there," notes Sethkill, admiring all the precious metal on display, rings and bracelets and torcs and stuff. He's surprised that Terrowne doesn't seem to be worried that he might be scoping the place out to try and steal it.

"I'm like a dragon, but with less ravaging of the surrounding countryside," smiles Terrowne. "Yes, a little small-scale accumulating of the shiny stuff, but I like to do constructive things with it."

His eye is caught by a series of talismans, resembling small metal rings, in which wires have been woven across the empty space, twisted together in a spiral across one half the diameter, and then braided back into the ring again. The result looks almost exactly like a silva tree, with small palely blue chips of transparent crystal strung upon the wider end like leaves, whereas the barer spread at the other end looks more like roots. Other examples are peridotite green, or an autumnal red, and mixed in are small leaves of finely precious metals, silver and gold, that add to the appearance of foliage, or whitish clouded crystals like flowers.

Each is unique, although they're really quite cheap and probably easy to produce, requiring only a certain dexterity easily expected of someone patient enough to create fine-work and engravings. They're something you could make whilst looking at something else entirely.

Sethkill examines some of the finished and near-finished pieces on the central display bench, the bigger ones owning their own unusual aesthetic. There's an assortment of predictable pieces out around the edges, fine chains, rings and bracelets to the scale of the physiology they're meant to be worn on and made from the sort of rare shiny metals you'd expect, but some of it is baroque to the point of being strange. A broach has been made out of a section of nearly worthless crystals of sulphate metal, stringently arranged as a series of overlapping iron parallelograms, still inside the inner edges of the amethyst-lined vein from which it has been extracted.

The whole thing has been cut out in a neat circle, without a single scratch, and coated with some sort of transparent clear resin to keep it together and preserve the integrity of the surfaces. It's amazingly technically impressive, but worth almost nothing in terms of the materials, although he could imagine someone paying well for it just in terms of its unusual perfection.

Before he can stop himself, the story spills out.

"I made something kind of like that for my girlfriend once," he tells Terrowne, censoring the tale a little because it doesn't matter precisely what he was doing with her at the time. "We found this chunk of coal gum, at least that's what I think you'd call it, embedded in a seam at the beach so I took it home for her, still in the block of coal, and cut it down for her to an oval shape. I had to put a layer of sealant around it to get it to stay together, because it was full of all sorts of little bits, all dark and sparkly. But it looked much, much better than some perfectly polished and graded bit of commercial junk. I put this gold claw-mount on the back of it, and she liked to wear it on colorful choker collars at special occasions, or on a chain like a necklace."

"Used to?" prompts Terrowne, almost as though propping wide some ready-made conversational opening. "Did something happen to her?"

"She's missing," Sethkill explains, and starts to tell him a quick precis of events.

~*~

Now that they're sitting down, Sethkill has a chance to take in more about Terowne's appearance, which is, if he was forced to take a stand on it, really quite deceptively ordinary.

He has, for example, just the very slightest touch of those modified facial features you get from a use of augmentations and mods, which makes him more normal-looking than almost everyone in Hybrazeal. The ears are just a tiny bit pointed, the cheekbones just the faintest bit more defined in a manner that could be easily written off as some ever so slightly exotic ethnic ancestry. He has a set of gold rings in each ear, no less than four on each side in fact, two small but wider ones close around the flesh on the top edge, and two more normally positioned ones on the lower edge, that hang slightly in the usual manner. Wearing sets of two like that is some sort of Azatlani thing, that Sethkill hasn't quite gotten to the bottom of but reminds himself to ask himself someday.

The eyes are blue, but that's also unremarkable. Whilst the Azatlani normally have brown pupils, humans do come in other shades in other places, and getting the eye color changed to something more to your taste is the simplest possible tweak, like buying a pair of sunglasses. Presumably he likes blue, or something just as basic. His hair is dark, but not that serious dark with long flowing black strands, like you see in on the Asian waterfront people in Azatlani soaps. Sethkill guesses it was just the usual Azatlani thing, and has been 'improved' slightly for the usual reasons, personal self-esteem maybe. He wears it long but not that long, less trying to look cool, more 'tried to grow it out but it kept breaking off, so I trimmed it back a bit.'

There's also relatively little to say about his build. He's kind of slightly skinny but manages to give the impression of being slightly big, missing out on both categories equally in a way that puts paid to any notion of fashion model or strong man, though he does seem to have enough muscle to do whatever he needs to. He's not even that tall, a little under the optimized height for an Azatlani by, say, about three fingers or so. Maybe he didn't want to modify himself taller because it would only emphasize the look of, well, average.

Suspicion congeals further in Sethkill's high pneuma that this is just a ploy by the Old Man to get his relatives, and significant others, out from under a possible threat. This is no-one important. If he were, then why is he taking him back, towards the danger?

Terrowne offers Sethkill some tea, which he brews up himself in an elongate three-legged teapot that looks like it used to be an oil lamp before creative modifications were made, involving a silver strainer and mesh to dump the herbs into. He pours it into a couple of cheap mugs, one of which is chipped and one of which is cracked, that have been repaired by introducing a sort of melted up alloy containing real gold into the assorted interstices.

If he wasn't co-habitating with a gorgeous, udderly-stacked girl with enormous tits, then Sethkill would probably take the various cultural cues, including making and wearing his own jewelry, to indicate that he was most probably inclined toward other boys. As it is, he decides it's more a kind of not giving a damn style, the sort seen in those raised rich, or who have carefully cultivated it as they grew older, despite being no richer than anyone else. It could be mistaken for elegance, were it not for the fact that such an individual will happily answer the door in yesterdays dirty clothes, or caustically disdain even the most important sponsor whilst wearing the finest couture.

~*~

Velkos is wearing a camo blanket made for hunting.

Or at least that is Sethkills impression. Terrowne seems confounded.

"Damn, I literally did everything I could to stop you coming along," he sighs. "Which part of 'very probably highly dangerous' did you not get? You know I used to be involved in some stuff. This is that sort of stuff. I wanted you to stay behind where it was safe."

"Which is why I grabbed your old hunting cloak!" Velkos declares proudly, waving the length of digital fabric back and forth as it tries ineffectually to keep up with the textures and colours of its immediate background. It's not military issue and has power supply problems which keep it from running too fast, meaning that it's only effective if you move slowly and don't use it for too long.

"I searched the back seat and the cargo bay area!"

"I moved from one to the other in case you thought of that."

Terrowne makes an incoherent face-palming sort of noise. "Well, we've gone too far by now. We can't turn back without it taking way too much time. If you want to get out of this alive, and I am being very specific about the alive, you need to stick with us. No running off, no recreational-type activities - and you know what I mean - and you stay put if and when I say to stay put."

"You don't get to tell me what to do."

"And I love that about you, but there is a whole weapons threat of mass destruction thing going on here. You do not have the required skills to deal with something like that and it will not pause to let you get out of the way. Which is why I wanted you to stay well out of the way."

"I'm sorry honey," says Velkos, all conciliatory-like, and snuggles her tiny frame and big boobs up against him by slipping into his lap. It's impossible to remain angry against those wide glowingly blue eyes, and he hugs her back and gives her a little kiss against her tight pouty dark mouth.

She gives him a little dash of tongue and then licks her lips self-consciously before letting it slip back inside, but shows no sign of moving. She'll stay put for a while as as a reassurance against his anger, knowing she can get away with things and he won't call her on on it while her tits are all up in his face. They forgive one another routinely in exchange for companionship.

"Velkos,"sighs Terrowne finally in irritation, holding her chin. "Note her total dedication, and complete and unswerving obedience. If you get out of this alive I will find a suitable mistress to help me re-train you thoroughly in how to be a good girl."

"Thank-you!" exclaims Velkos happily, as casually as if she has asked him to pass the salt, seeming to take this as full permission to come along. She scrambles gracefully back out of his lap, gives him another little kiss on the cheek and hops back into the third seat behind them, casting Sethkill a small glare out the corner of her eye where Terrowne can't see. "So, where we going?"