Random 55

"What-- be there in a minute." She slipped back into her trousers, watched by a dragon confused having the evening routine broken. An unpleasant suspicion between "living evidence" and "wounded person" made her snatch her staff from a corner. The defensive spells mostly had faded, but it made her feel safer.

With a squawk Ayu-Asra launched himself at Sylvie and clung to her shoulder, forcing her to calm him down a bit. He re-tucked his wings and dug his claws into her shirt, murring quietly. No noise from inside the house indicated anybody else being out and about.

Her boots in one hand and staff in the other, Sylvie snuck downstairs into the kitchen. After slipping on the well-worn footgear, she unbarred the door to the yard.

Sebastian-Kai was in movement the moment Sylvie was, too, dragging the poor unconscious thug toward the door. He grinned nervously when he heard the door becoming unbarred, and the moment he was inside, wet, still bleeding and dragging a far more injured body, Sebastian-Kai spoke softly. "I snooped, they attacked the four of them and..." he cursed in a language Sylvie would not have known, touching his hurt wrist, "...and we are in deep trouble."

By the looks of it, or at least his tear-filled eyes (pain, mostly), he was shocked.

"Why in particular?" The main reason her voice remained calm was that her attention was split at least three ways: the mess they dragged in the kitchen, Sebastian's state, what he said... She pulled him over to a seat next to the stove which still spread residual heat and looked for a light.

He almost hugged the stove, but first he helped with the table. Clear it. Make as little noise as possible. Be silent.

His voice remained calm, too, but it was mostly due to the fact that he was in a trance of sorts. A trickle of blood creeped down into his left eye. "They killed Langoll. The Sabas." The trance changed states -- now it turned toward anger. "This... this one was one of those hired -- hired to see that nobody asked too many questions."

His hands shook. No surprise. Sebastian was angry. "There is a letter in this one's belongings, somewhere, something about the Sabas. But... I. I would like to hear him speak of it himself."

Sylvie had a candle lighted and put out of the way. When she saw Sebastian's face she found a clean dishrag and gave it to him, guiding his hand to press it on the headwound. A quick look at the guy he had dragged in showed her only that that one was still breathing. "I see. Do you have a plan here?" She had her doubts that was the right thing to ask as soon as she'd said it, but somehow they had to get on track.

Ayu-Asra took the opportunity to climb from her shoulder to Sebastian's.

Sebastian held the dishrag tight against his cut in spite of the throbbing wrist. He paid little to no attention to Ayu-Asra. Instead, he let his eyes unfocus so as to keep his mind on the question. "Not yet, not entirely, but I see a very distinct chain of circumstancial evidence pointing toward the Sabas. This unfortunate on the table may not know much, but it certainly appears as though the Sabas are behind this. Now, with Langoll dead, the only place to find solid evidence..." He fell silent.

"I meant more immediately, for example if you intend for him to get out of here alive." There'd be problems either way. Sylvie tried to think through the ramifications logically, to keep her rising distress at bay. She wanted to get started doing something. The low volume of Sebastian's voice drew her mind towards secrecy. She brought a spell to her mind, automatically facing the centre of the room holding her hands so her palms were facing each other.

The dragon meanwhile started licking blood off Sebastian's face.

"Ah." He blinked, and still didn't react to the dragon. It didn't really even seem to bother him. "Well, I thought we might patch him up, interrogate him with... ah... well, I think you know this world's plants and drugs better to make him conducive to talk his head off. Like Nico does."

And then, once he got a tingle from something, he blinked and turned to regard Sylvie earnestly. Apparently, he had sensed something hinting toward magic.

Sylvie shook her head and said in a faraway voice, "The usual go-to is alcohol."

A low hum emanated from the air between her hands. She tugged a strand of the spell-in-making and gave a thoughtful hum, which did not "echo". Taking that as a sign it was right enough, she let the pattern branch out. In a few moments it expanded into an invisible bubble about the size of the room. The sounds of rain and runoff were dulled to a low volume, nearly indistuingishable.

"Sound, well, not profing exactly. Don't lean on it, but it might help," she explained, voice as quiet as before, wiping her hands, and considered Sebastian's idea. Some things used against pain might have useful side-effects, actually. Question being if they worked with the idea that the man had to be conscious and lucid enough. She wanted to have a better impression how badly he was damaged. To help with that and to give her magic sense some time to lose the air-affinity that had come with the sound spell, she lighted two more candles.

As always with magic of any sort, Sebastian stared and referred to his past experiences. He was tense at first, but then relaxed when Sylvie began to explain. "I find alcohol to be a very unreliable method of extracting information. Some turn out to be angry drunks, some amiable fools like me," he said, looking around and wondering exactly what kind of spell this was -- academically speaking. He had found that he had very little magical talent, for reasons he hadn't grasped. Oh, they had tried, many times, but his personal opinion was that a certain deity was at work.

He snapped back to reality. "I shall try not to. Still, surely... surely you must have something in mind? The last time I was in this world, I was... well." He fell silent and grinned nervously.

"Not sure he'd call you amiable," Sylvie murmured. The broken nose was, well, in-your-face. Lifting his head found a swollen bump. There seemed to be a lot of concussions going on around Sebastian.

To his question she answered, "Maybe. But it may not also put him to sleep. If we can wake him up." She gave him a questioning look in case he wanted to explain. Meanwhile she considered dropping the line she had on Kirrya.

Sebastian blinked. "Oh, I'm amiable. When drunk." He almost seemed innocent, but then he approached the poor victim. "I think smelling salts would be quite helpful for that first part."

Ayu-Asra, looking for a less mobile perch, took a short flight and settled on the stovetop, making the candles flicker.

"Hmm," she said, attention on the patient, or whatever you wanted to call him. There was a swelling over his right collarbone that might be caused by a break; the man twitched when she probed it, still mostly relying on her normal sense of touch, but he did not wake up yet. Her magic readjusted to flesh; the rest of the examination went quick and outwardly cursory, and uncovered no more serious injuries. No fractured skull or bleeding in his brain.

"Got off lightly for someone trying to kill you," she commented absent-mindedly, lightly stressing "kill" rather than "you", "if he won't miss the teeth too much. Broken collarbone, I can set that. I expect he won't mind taking something against the pain." She was not all that sure about that last point, and gave Sebastian a look. Kirrya had been terrified of him without having been beaten up first, so how would this guy react?

"Oh, I would expect not. I've broken that bone more than a few times, and it is terribly painful." He didn't mention the circumstances -- he didn't want to recount the time it involved a carriage full of cabbages. Sebastian thought for a moment, trying to read the underlying message in her speech. "How... strong a medicine can you give him? Something that would keep him lucid but still groggy enough?"

Frowning at the thug, Sylvie gave a half-shrug. "We'll have to try with a low dose first and hope for the best, I guess." If there wouldn't have been the problem of keeping the screams down, she would have suggested just hitting him some more and seeing where that got them.

"Sage advice," said Sebastian, staring at the thug himself. He was somewhat similarly inclined, and to his deep embarrassment, knew ways to make a man -- a man, precisely -- talk. He had first-hand experience on many torture methods. Being tortured yourself had a way of permanently burning that skill in oneself.

"I'll see if I can find what I have in mind," Sylvie said, winding her hair in a knot to keep it from falling into her face. She had picked up a candle and was heading towards the door to the inside of the house when she stopped in her tracks. "Do you need anything?"

"A stiff drink, good sex or maybe something that will get my heart from pumping so hard when I think about what I'm going to do to those -- those bastards," he said silent, shrugged and twitched. Ah, the old drug of excitement. Always a mocker.

Distracted by trying to remember what she knew about the medicine storageat Old Ivy, Sylvie answered, "You could try balm for the last one." She nodded at the collection of tea tins on a shelf. "Probably not strong enough, but might be worth a try."

Again thinking about alphabetisation, she added more quietly, "The other two, I'd suggest we see about later."

As she walked towards the door, the fingers of her free hand twitched by her side - no magic, just nerves about sneaking about in her hosts' house.

His brain went over the words quickly, so quickly that his eyes caught first her face and then the tea. "It's worth a try," he said evenly, although he adjusted his clothes a bit to hide a very juvenile reaction to the quieter words. He sometimes wondered if others as old as him -- however old that was -- could be teenagers and old souls at the same time. "Yes. Let's see about that later," Sebastian said just as quietly as he began to go over the tea tins, without ever stopping to check on the thug for more than every five seconds.

Still, he smiled a little. Secretly.

Sylvie forced herself to move slowly to keep the noise down, and to think as little as possible about the next step, or what she might have missed, to keep from losing her nerves.

The storage room was near the front of the house, right behind the shop, but not linked with it directly. The door from the shop into the house would be locked overnight, the one from the corridor to storage wasn't. Sylvie breathed a little easier with it closed behind her, for just a moment before she started worrying again.

Opposite the door sat a tidy worktable; left and right were multitudes of shelves with many drawers, all labelled and in alphabetic order which, in this alphabet, Sylvie was not entirely firm on. The painkiller she had in mind was not where she checked first. She stopped for a deep breath and a thought. Her memory produced a surprisingly clear image of one of the herbals Garren and she had worked with. "...poppy, from which opium is extracted." Not shelved under the name of the plant, then. She found a small bottle of an alcoholic extract, and trusted that the potency would not be too different from basically the same plant she had encountered elsewhere.

Keeping up the sound-dampening spell was a slight but noticeable strain, and she wanted to hurry, but not forget something being too hasty. Bandages, she was not sure where they were stored, not in this room by the look of it. Besides, missing those would be harder to come up with an excuse for. Improvise.

Smelling salts, Sebastian had said. She'd never seen that written down, and could not find it in the two places she checked based on the sound of it. Something to wake up people with smell? Spirit of hartshorn. A word for hart or deer in this language did not want to come to her mind.

The bottle she held nearly slipped her fingers when she felt a chill running all over her skin - feedback from her spell being put to a test. She gave up and made her way back rather more quickly.