Chapter Three Hundred and Seventy-Nine — Polite Friction
Chapter Three Hundred and Seventy-Nine — Polite Friction The elf receptionist at the Exploration Guild didn’t even bat an eye when we came in dragging a seething noble and asked to put him in a cell. He merely asked if we wanted to be discreet about it or if one of the more public cells was fine.I think it was a little weird that the Exploration Guild had a secret dungeon, but it also had a secret workshop that we’d seen already, so really it wasn’t all that surprising.Baron Vonowl continued to protest as we dragged him through a sliding bookcase (We had to get one of those onto the Beaver Cleaver) and plopped him down in a cell.The rest of us gathered on the far wall of the prison space, none of us really comfortable with all the strange devices and racks and sharp implements laying on tables and hooked to the walls. At least the room was well lit, even if the light was all red and flickery and felt a lot like it was chosen more to set the mood than to make it easy to see.Tharval gestured to the baron, then turned towards Willowbud. “Well, do your thing,” he said.“My thing?” Willowbud asked.Tharval tugged at his beard. “That’s right. Your thing. Get the idiot to tell us what we want to know.”“Ah, that thing,” Willowbud said with a nod, then he shook his head. “I don’t want to do that thing. There are children here.”“We’re not children,” I said. I was sixteen, which was pretty firmly not the age of a child. My friends were all about that age too. Maybe Calamity was the oldest... or maybe it was Caprica, it was hard to tell. In any case, none of us were children.“In any case,” Willowbud said, and I felt as if I’d just been dismissed. “We won’t torture the good baron, use any hard social skills on him, or push him too hard. We aren’t as cruel as that.”“You're cowards, then,” the baron snapped from inside his cell. He was rubbing his wrists and glaring out at us. “You mush-brained cretins! You think that you can just dump me in some cell and forget about me? Fine then. Do that. I won’t be the first of us locked away, and I won’t be the first to find his way out of a cell either.”“Are you talking about Rainewt?” I asked.“Do you think you can convince me to talk?” he asked right back.“Honestly, I wonder if we could convince you to stop talking,” Amaryllis said. That had the baron glaring even harder. He really didn’t like Amaryllis.“Disgusting, no-good brat. You have no idea how good you had it, do you?”“Is this coming from a baron?” Amaryllis asked. “Please, tell me how awful your life as lesser nobility was. Did someone with more clout than you mock you? Wait, no, someone probably just pointed out the truth, and you couldn't handle it.”“As if you’d understand, little Albatross princess! You and your filthy family sit near the top, driving our fine nation to ruin!”I stepped up between the baron and Amaryllis. “Okay, guys,” I said. “Insulting each other won’t help any, I don’t think. It’s not very friendly behaviour.”“Shut up, you half-breed.”I blinked, then decided to let that pass. The Baron wasn’t in a very nice place in his life at the moment, and and while that wasn't a reason to forgive being mean, it did explain it a little. “Alright, alright, enough with the name-calling and the insults, please? Amaryllis, you’re a good girl, don’t be like that. And Baron Vonowl, it’s not very noble of you to fling insults around.”“What would you know about nobility?” he asked.“Well, I’ve hugged a bunch of them,” I said.The baron blinked, a little confused for some reason.“Ah, should we ask him questions while he’s here?” Awen asked.“Isn’t it good enough that he can no longer be used by Rainnewt to cause any harm?” Caprica asked. “The time he spends in a cell is time he can’t be disruptive.”“But what if he did something disruptive already?” Awen asked. “He was buying weapons, but what if he bought other stuff? And besides, where were those weapons going in the first place?”We all turned towards the baron, who took a small step back at our collective look. “Well, Mister Baron Vonowl,” I started. “Do you think you could tell us a thing or two about all that?”“I’m not telling you anything,” he bit out.“What if we say please?” I asked.Ding! For repeating a Special Action a sufficient number of times you have unlocked the general skill: Politeness!I jumped as Mister Menu-who I hadn’t seen in a while!-popped up in front of me as a little blue box.“Broccoli?” Awen asked.“I got a skill,” I said.“Interrogation?” Willowbud guessed. “Though we haven’t really started with that. It’s a useful skill to have. I could give you some tips.”“No, Politeness,” I said.That stumped the elf.“What kind of harebrained skill is that?” Amaryllis asked. “Refuse it, of course.”“You can do that?” I asked. I could've avoided all the trouble with Cuteness! “I’ve never refused a skill before, they just slot right in.”“World spare me,” Amaryllis said. “No wonder you’re so... anyway, Politeness doesn’t seem like the most useful of skills, Broccoli. You’re hardly impolite to begin with.”“I know some people who could have used the skill,” Caprica said. “But I do agree, it doesn’t seem immediately useful. Is it a class skill?”“A general,” I said with a shake of my head.PolitenessRank F — 0%The ability to appear as a polite, respectable person when desiring to.“The description isn't all that helpful,” I said before repeating it aloud.“That really doesn’t seem like a very good skill for you, Broccoli,” Awen said.“Yeah, but I haven’t gotten a new skill in so long,” I said. “Why this one now? Shouldn’t I have gotten this the first time I said please and thank you? Wait, do I not say those often enough? Have I been impolite until now?”Stolen novel; please report.Awen patted my head. “You’re not impolite, Broccoli,” she said.“Okay, okay,” I said. “It doesn’t matter, I guess I’ll just level it passively in the background, and maybe it’ll turn into something handy!”Ding! Four of your current skills are eligible for Merging: Dancing, Tea Making, Matchmaking, and Politeness!“Oh!” I said before I tried to grab Mister Menu in a quick hug. He, of course, ducked out of the way.“What is it now?” Amaryllis asked.“Why do you people spend time with this clown in your midst?” Baron Vonowl asked with a gesture at me.“She’s our leader,” Awen explained.The Baron reeled back. “She’s the one in charge? Are you all so stupid that none of you are better? Why would you let her be the leader? She's incompetent!”I deflated a bit mid-lunge to catch Mister Menu. That was very mean.“She’s competent enough to capture you,” Caprica pointed out, which did a number on the Baron’s self-esteem, judging by how he flinched back.“Ignore him,” Amaryllis said. “He’s proven time and time again to be an idiot.”“Nya shouldn’t listen to idiots,” Calamity said with a nod. “It’s why so many folk ignore me.”I nodded along too. “I won’t let the mean words bring me down, I’m not fragile or anything. Anyway! I got a merge skill! It’s Politeness, Dancing, Tea Making, and Matchmaking together.”“What’s the end result of that?” Amaryllis asked. “Four skills merging all at once is quite something.”“Uncommon, though not unheard of,” Willowbud said. “You seem to have a lot of social skills if you have enough that they can combine that way.”“Ah, thanks,” I said. “I didn’t really make any effort to pick social stuff though.”I poked at Mister Menu to see what the confluence of all those skills would be. It was a good question.Do you wish to Merge Dancing, Tea Making, Matchmaking, and Politeness to unlock theSocial Butterfly skill?“Huh, it’s the... um?” I paused when Amaryllis tapped my shoulder.“Not in here,” she said. “Hold off on that for a little bit? We can talk about it and pick a good option once we’re back on our ship. You have more than just friends in this room.” She nodded her head towards the baron stewing in his cage.“Oh, right,” I said. I adjusted my clothes to make sure they fit on right, then smiled at the baron. “So, are you ready to talk yet?”“You haven’t even started the torture,” he rolled his eyes. “All that you’ve done is reveal your complete lunacy.”I wondered if harpy had a species-wide disposition towards insults, or if it was more of a cultural thing. No wonder they’d been having such a long-standing argument with the sylph.“We’re not going to do anything like that,” I said. “We just want to know a few things. Why you were buying all those crossbows, where you were sending them, what the plan was with kidnapping all those nobles, what your relationship with Rainnewt is, that sort of thing.”“We know why he kidnapped the nobles,” Amaryllis said. “It was to force the sylph to release Rainnewt from custody.”“Ah, but they kidnapped them before Rainnewt was captured,” Caprica pointed out. "And Rainnewt didn't strike me as someone who thought he was likely to be captured, so it probably wasn't a preemptive plan."Amaryllis frowned, then nodded, conceding the point. “Fair enough. Then it was either for the ransom money, or for the potential to destabilise things.”“Or he just did it because he could,” Calamity said. “This guy doesn’t strike me as smart enough for long-term plans.”“Are you trying to get me to divulge things by insulting me? You’re a million years too young for that to work, dog.”“Dog?” Calamity asked as he stood a little straighter. His ears twitched. “I’m not a dog, I’m a cat, you overfluffed turkey.”“You know nothing!” Baron Vonwol said. “And once the proper authorities find out what you’ve done to me, you’ll be finished. There will be no room for fools of your calibre in the future that Rainnewt and I are ushering in, and even if you remove me, I was just some small cog. We don’t need those weapons to ruin that wedding, and we don’t need my presence to ensure that everything nonetheless goes according to plan. Do you think us unable to deal with a few minor setbacks?”“Wedding?” a couple of us asked at the same time.The baron’s mouth clicked shut, and he looked away. Pouting didn’t become him, but he was doing it anyway.We poked and prodded at him a little more, but from that point on, he just crossed his wings and refused to speak any.Eventually we gave up. There was no pushing the baron past a certain point. Willowbud said he’d take care of the baron for a while, but we couldn’t really hold him forever. We didn’t have the right and what we were doing was a teensy bit super not-okay legally.“So, what wedding was he talking about?” I asked.“It would have to be an important one,” Amaryllis said. “Caprica, any ideas?”“I don’t know of any approaching royal weddings, I can tell you that much. None of the bigger nobles either. Maybe an earl or two? Weddings aren’t uncommon, but I imagine Rainnewt would be after something big.”“Don’t look at me,” Calamity said. “Most of the weddings I’ve been to have been more about the shindig than anything else.”“Well, maybe we can listen around?” I asked. “The baron bought hundreds of weapons, that’s a lot for a wedding of all things.”Something was up, and we didn’t know nearly as much as we needed to, even if we had the baron in custody. It felt like no matter what we did, it just wasn't enough.
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Chapter Three Hundred and Eighty — The Wedding Trackers
Chapter Three Hundred and Eighty — The Wedding Trackers We regrouped in the parlour on the floor above, where the older members of the Exploration Guild were gathered around, drinking and reminiscing and doing whatever it was old folk did when they were put together in a room and left to their own devices.“So, what does that leave us with?” Caprica asked.“It leaves you with a potential location,” Willowbud said. “An unspecified wedding, presumably somewhere on the continent.”“Har har,” Amaryllis said, clearly unamused. “That wedding could be anywhere. We’re not exactly tied into the social networks of most countries, so if it’s going to take place in the Trenten Flats or the Harpy Mountains, then we won’t know for a good long while.”“Ah, we have a timetable,” Awen said.We glanced at her.“The weapons need to arrive, right? So we know that Rainnewt’s plan probably involved waiting for them to get there. When were they going to be shipped?”“It looked like the Baron was hard at work nagging the manufacturers to move faster,” Caprica said. “Good point, Awen, that does give us a small window. We know this wedding probably isn’t tomorrow. The further out it is, the further away the wedding will be, to account for the weapon’s necessary travel time.”“Not that helpful,” Calamity said. “Uh, no offence meant, Awen. Good idea and all, just we still don’t know the when.”“We could ask the crew of the ships the baron hired. That’ll give us a more accurate picture,” Amaryllis said. “Unless those guys have already left town. Or if they were planning on transferring the goods to another ship along the way. It might still give us a rough heading. Not every port ships to every location, so we can probably assume the most convenient routes are the ones Vonowl was planning on using. That barely narrows it down.”Willowbud shrugged. “We’ll continue to question the baron.”“Bah, bring him to the forge, I’ll roast that chicken for a few hours and then we’ll see if he talks,” Tharval said.Willowbud patted the dwarf on the head, which seemed to really insult him. “No Tharval, we won’t torture the idiot noble, no matter how tempting. When our adversaries sink, we swim.”I listened to the conversation going on around me, the back and forth and the friendly bickering, and I just soaked it all in. It was tense, but not bad.While my friends talked, I debated over Social Butterfly.The skill seemed really nice to have. It was what I aspired to be, in a way. A person who could make friends easily. Maybe I didn’t want to rely too much on a skill for that, but it didn’t seem too dishonest to have a bit of help. After all, my other skills also helped me make friends.Cleaning helped by making it so that I wasn’t stinky when I met new people, for example, and that was important for socialising and I wouldn’t consider it a cheat.Losing some of my other skills for Social Butterfly would hurt a little though. Matchmaking’s... matchmaking part wasn’t super interesting to me, but the way it helped with small fire spells was nice. Tea making was a great buffing skill, even if I probably didn’t use it to its full potential.Really, the big loss was Dancing. It was, strangely enough, one of my main combat skills. It allowed me to have a more sure footing and to dance around opponents and predict their moves. It was super useful!Then again, I had Way of the Mystic Bun now, which did something similar.It would also free up some class skill slots. Dancing was a Cinnamon Bun Bun class skill, Tea Making was a Wonderlander skill, and both Matchmaking and Politeness were generals. With one new skill I’d open up three slots for new, shinier skills.And then there was the winged elephant in the room.Would Social Butterfly eventually give me butterfly wings?I looked at Caprica, who had big, fluttery faerie wings on her back. They were pretty, a translucent, pale-blue film stretched over spar-like veins. They reminded me a little of stained glass. Careful and delicate and obviously very magical. Caprica might have been a rather tiny woman, but she still had to weigh too much for those wings to give her lift.Maybe?High school physics class was a while ago. Still, I remembered that thing about bee wings not being able to lift them up, even though they clearly did anyway. Maybe this was something like that? Or maybe it was just magic.In any case, I wouldn’t mind being a bun with wings!“Broccoli?” Awen asked.“Hmm? Oh, sorry, I was distracted by something. What’s up?” I asked.“Ah, we were going to go get some food,” Awen said. “Me and Calamity.” She waved a little piece of paper around. “Did you want something?”“Oh? I’ll go with you!” I said. “Need to get my daily skips in any way, and I could use a walk.”“Sure!” Awen said with a genuine little smile. “I wouldn’t mind having you along.”I bounced out of my seat and followed Awen to the door, where Calamity was waiting while spinning his hat around on one finger. “Nya coming along too?” he asked. “Less to carry then!”I laughed. “I mostly want to move a bit.”“That’s fair. I don’t mind a pinch of planning, but some of our friends back there like talking more than they like moving, I think. Amaryllis and Caprica both.”“They’re not so bad,” I said.He shrugged. “I’ve known worse. Just I’m more of a doer, nya know?”“Mhm!”Was I a doer?Do you wish to Merge Dancing, Tea Making, Matchmaking, and Politeness to unlock theSocial Butterfly skill?"Yeah," I said to Mister Menu. I was a doer, and that meant taking concrete steps toward being the best friend I could be. Mister Menu popped away with a soap-bubble ‘plop’ and I felt myself shift slightly with my next step. My balance felt oh-so subtly different, as if the bounce in my step had changed in quality.Where do you wish your new skill to be placed? Cinnamon Bun Bun, Wonderlander, General Skills?Oh, that was something to consider, wasn’t it?“Wonderlander,” I muttered. I was planning on getting this skill up a few levels, so that only made sense!New Skill added!Skills consolidated!Skill Points refunded!Oh! I had to check on the difference that made for my skills!
