Rouge VIII (Patreon)

It was amazingly easy to track down someone who remembered Matilda’s dad, Matthew. Or ‘Cap’n Matt’, as he was known. First, they found the harbormaster’s office, and he was able to tell them (after some convincing, in the form of a few gold coins) that Driftpoint went out of business shortly after the Monnow went missing. In fact, Cap’n Matt’s vessel wasn’t the only one that vanished that season. Several companies had suffered losses from pirate attacks, but Driftpoint had lost every one of their ships, with the Monnow being the last.

However, the former owner of Driftpoint, one Thirsty Whoell, could usually be found at a dockside tavern called Whykicky. Conveniently, Whykicky was nearby, and when Rouge and Vexxx entered its dim, somewhat rank confines, they quickly found the man the harbormaster had described to them. Thirsty was a smallish man, with a sour, wrinkled face, and a superiority complex they could see from across the room. He even lifted his pinky when he sipped from a mug the size of his head.

Rouge and Vexxx exchanged glances. For some reason, most people found the mage off-putting, so Rouge had been taking the lead in interrogating people. Now, though, as she slid into the seat across from Thirsty, he just glared at her. At least, he did until she pulled a gold coin from nowhere and used [Sleight of Hand] to send it dancing around her fingers. Then, his expression turned momentarily calculating, before he set his mug down with a thump and leaned back on his rickety wooden stool.

“What do you want?” he asked, and Rouge started a little at the smooth, plummy accent that emerged from him.

“Um-,” she faltered. This guy wasn’t going to respond well to cute and bubbly, and that was about all she could pull off with her current appearance.

Vexxx sighed loudly and smacked his palm down on the table with a crack. It was almost cool. “Cap’n Matt,” Vexxx said, his tenor voice managing a credible growl. “Three years ago, his ship was supposedly lost. Tell us about it,” he tilted his head toward the gold coin, now lying on the back of Rouge’s hand, all but forgotten, “and the money’s yours.”

Thirsty gave an ingratiating smile that nearly cracked his face and said, “Not much to tell, dear boy. Pirates were bad that year, and Matthew was an excellent captain. I’m certain he went down with his ship, as he should.” His hand darted out toward the gold, and only Rouge’s excellent reflexes allowed her to snatch it away before he could grab it.

::What are you doing?:: she sent to Vexxx, silently.

He scowled. ::I don’t know. I just don’t like this guy. He’s lying.::

Rouge frowned and looked back at Thirsty, who was glaring between the two players. He was snooty, sure, and condescending, but lying?

::Look,:: Vexxx said, ::if Matt went down with the ship, we wouldn’t even be here, right? A dead guy isn’t going to come back and play happy family with that kid.:: He hesitated. ::Well, this is a game, so I guess that could happen, but that doesn’t mean this guy isn’t lying. He’s totally sus.::

Rouge blinked. She was generally pretty good with people. She could tell the good from the bad, and could even, usually, get them to do what she wanted them to do, given enough time and leverage. So, what was her cousin seeing that she wasn’t? Or was he just… wrong?

She leaned forward, ignoring the cherry-blossom pink hair that fell around her face as she did so. She made a second coin appear beside the first, then twirled them between her fingers and made them both vanish into thin air. Well, into her inventory, but Thirsty wouldn’t know that.

“Tell us the real story, Mr. Whoell. Right now, we’re the ones asking. But,” a little stack of gold appeared in her palm, “pretty soon other people will want to know, and they won’t ask nicely.”

::What other people?:: Silus squeaked. ::Matilda? She’s always nice.::

::Not real people,:: Rouge explained. ::Imaginary people. Mean, imaginary people.:: From the corner of her eyes, she saw her cousin face-palm, but it didn’t matter, because Thirsty had paled. His eyes were locked on her hand, but his body twitched, as if he couldn’t decide whether to grab for the money, or just run away.

Rouge flipped just one of the coins into Thirty’s mug. It fell into the murky liquid with a plunk, and the man’s shifty eyes transferred to the vessel as if mesmerized. “All right,” he whispered, leaning forward to circle the mug with both hands. His eyes continued to dart around, even though it was broad daylight and there were all of two other patrons in the tavern.

“Look,” Thirsty said, his posh accent sounding strained, “I worked hard to build Driftpoint. I inherited my first few ships from my father, who did well enough for himself to send me to a good school. A school where I made friends with important people. When he died, I used those skills and relationships to buy ship after ship, building a fleet that could rival those of the nobility.” His lip lifted in a sneer. “I even married the youngest daughter of a landless noble, and my house was on the rise.”

He shifted, eyes glancing from the gold coins in Rouge’s hand to his mug, and she flicked a second coin in to join the first. Thirsty relaxed a little more, and continued. “Then, three years ago, everything started to go wrong. First, one ship went down in a kraken attack, then another ran afoul of a mermaid. Two more met their ends in a storm, and, just after I got a lucrative contract transporting ambergris from a distant island, the ship went down. The primitive savages decided that I’d been cursed, and refused to work with me. Ship after ship sank, crashed, or was lost to pirates, and in a single season, I lost everything. Everything except one last ship. The Monnow.”

His jaw muscles flexed as he clenched his teeth, and another coin entered the mug, sinking to the bottom with a sad burble. Sighing, Thirsty’s shoulders slumped, and he barely whispered, “It really was my fault, that time. I had insured my whole fleet, like a fool, and the insurance company insisted that since I hadn’t lost all of it, they owed me nothing. My wife left me, and I only had one chance… One chance to get everything back. So I hired the pirates.”

His fingers clenched on the mug. “They were supposed to sink her. Attack her within sight of an island, so there could be no doubt that she’d gone down. They did that part, but instead of sending the crew ashore in a lifeboat, they-,” his voice fell silent, and into the silence another coin sank with a plink.

“They took them,” he barely mouthed. “Took them, probably to sell, and that’s all I know. And, thanks to the fact that everyone else was also placing claims for lost ships, the insurance company went bankrupt as well! I lost everything. Everything.” He stared down at the gold glimmering through the cloudy stillness of his cup, but made no motion to retrieve it.

Vexxx’s hand reached out and took the last coin from Rouge’s palm. He held it up. “The name of the island, and the pirate.”

Without even looking up, Thirsty said, “Farewell Island. The pirate was Captain Shale.”

Vexxx released the coin, and it glittered as it tumbled through the air toward the mug. Rouge’s hand darted out and caught it just before it could slip beneath the surface of the foul liquid.

“No,” she said. “That’s enough gold.” She thrust her chair back and stood. With a thought, she conjured something else from her inventory, and set one round of silver after another neatly on the table. When she had placed thirty coins in front of Thirsty, she tapped the top of the precarious tower, sending the silver showering onto the table and floor in a cacophony of clinks. As Thirsty scrambled to pick them all up, Rouge turned on her heel and walked out.

Vexxx hurried after her, and as they both mounted and rode away, he said, “What was that?”

Rouge shrugged. “I don’t like traitors.”

He rolled his eyes. “Yeah, I got that. You do know that thirty silver adds up to way more than one gold, though, right?”

Now, she grinned, and held up her hand, where four gold coins glittered wetly from between her fingers. “Oh, I know. I also know I stole back all the other gold, and that the other people in that tavern didn’t look like the kind of folks who were just going to let good old Thirsty wander off with all those coins. I doubt if he’s having a very good day, right now.”

Vexxx let out a long, low whistle. “Uh, remind me not to piss you off.”

Silus giggled. ::Oh, I will,:: she said.

With that, they headed back to the harbormaster’s office. This time, they didn’t use bribery to get him to help, since there was an actual book of what ships were in port and where they were heading, and the book was just lying out there on his desk, practically begging someone to read it. So, Silus and Vexxx distracted the harbormaster outside while Rouge did exactly that.

Sadly, there were no ships going directly to Farewell Island. That wasn’t actually too surprising, since Bright’s harbor opened onto Lake Ata, not the sea. Admittedly, the lake was large enough that it practically was an inland sea itself, but it was connected to the Sea of Serenity by a wide, peaceful river. While the port at the other end of the river was one of the many cities that had been destroyed by Akuji’s forces, it was also one of the few places that was actually being repopulated. Two ships were headed for that port today; the Western Star, and the Ironclad. Conveniently, they were docked near each other, and Rouge made a mental note of the dock numbers before letting her party know they could stop whatever they were doing.

A moment later, the harbormaster came storming back inside. His face was red and furious, and he pointed a trembling finger at Rouge when he saw her. “You! Out!” he shrieked. “And I had better never see you or your companion here again!”

Guiltily, Rouge hoped that ‘Sweet Kissez’ didn’t get any quests requiring her to visit the harbor any time soon. Obviously, Vexxx could take care of himself, but she didn’t want to cause trouble for the stranger whose face she was borrowing.

She gave the sweetest smile she could, and attempted a curtsey, though the slits in the pink skirt she was wearing made her flash a lot more leg at the man than she’d intended to. The ire in the harbormaster’s eyes died down, however, and as Rouge exited the building, she thought she heard him mutter something like ‘-don’t know what that lovely girl is doing with that villain’, so hopefully if Sweet Kissez ever did come down here, things wouldn’t go too badly for her.

Vexxx, too, looked sweaty and more than a little peevish as Rouge rounded the building to find him glaring at a very large, very unhappy orc. ::What took you so long?:: he snapped.

She shrugged, barely glancing at the orc as she caught her cousin’s robe on her way toward dock sixteen, and the Ironclad. :: The stupid book uses the map coordinates for destinations, rather than names. I had to find a map to make any sense of it. Bonus though,:: she shot a grin over her shoulder. ::Now we have a map.::

Silus giggled. ::You should have seen them all running around. Vexxx told the harbor-man that he saw a giant squid in the harbor, and the harbor-man didn’t even believe him, but he had to come look, and then they were running from one place to another, looking for this ‘squid’, and then the harbor-man called over his orc-friend to help-::

::Help,:: Vexxx snorted. ::Right. He wanted that guy to stomp on me. So salty.::

Rouge came to a stop in front of what looked more like a Mark Twain-era riverboat than the ‘Ironclad’ she’d been picturing, but it did, indeed, have sheets of metal riveted to its sides, providing it with a great deal more protection than the much smaller, purely wooden vessel in the slip beside it. She slowed to a halt, looking back and forth between the towering Ironclad, and the relatively petite Western Star.

“Well,” she said, “it’s time to pick a boat.”