“Look alive, the Gypsy,” Regan said, raising her head so quickly that her stool rocked beneath her. Having consumed several additional drinks following the initial purple monstrosity, she very nearly lost her balance completely, but Regan had been adrift on these seas many times before and she caught herself.
“Why?” Lilliana asked, dispirited by her utter failure to provoke a reaction from her old nemesis.
“Somethin’s happenin’.”
“Nothing’s happening,” Lilliana said sullenly, sipping an extravagant cocktail made from the most expensive liquors behind the bar. “We could blow up every bar on the station and nothing would happen.”
“That’s a thought, sure, but I’m deadly serious,” Regan said. “Someone’s workin’ some powerful magicks out there, like.”
“Bard… Regan,” Lilliana said. “This is not the time for stories. Don’t you see? I was sure I could beat him whatever the game was because I always have before, but he’s finally wised up. He’s winning the only way he can: by not playing.”
“Look, I’m tellin’ ya, somethin’s goin’ down,” Regan said. She dropped her voice. “Wait, we’re probably bein’ surveillanced, so I’ll just blink it to ya in code.”
Lilliana sighed.
“If that makes you happy,” she said.
Regan just sat there and stared at her, though, her single eye unmoving.
“Bard?” Lilliana said.
“Shh, the Gypsy,” Regan said. “Got… to… concentrate…”
“Which eye are you using?”
“Oh!” Regan said, and then she really did begin to blink rapidly.
Though the pattern seemed random, Lilliana’s keen cryptographic mind, familiar with codes and cants and ciphers in use throughout the inhabited galaxy, quickly ferreted out the true meaning of the sequence.
“You don’t know any codes, do you?” she said.
“Er… ah… that wasn’t one?” Regan asked. She started blinking spasmodically again. “How ’bout this, then?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Are ya sure o’ that?” Regan asked. “That one felt like a code.”
“I can promise you it wasn’t,” Lilliana said.
“Are ya sure, though?” Regan said. “I mean, it stands to reason ya couldn’t know every code, could ya? So that could be o’ the ones ya don’t know.”
“I’ll cede the point that it could conceivably mean something in some system of notation,” Lilliana said. “But the chance that it’s whatever you’re trying to say is…”
“So, ya do concede that there’s a chance, then,” Regan said.
“Just tell me what’s allegedly going on,” Lilliana said. When Regan started blinking again, she added, “In words.”
“Well, someone’s got ’round forty or fifty trained warlocks deployed all around us…”
“Only fifty?” Lilliana said, smirking. “Why not a hundred, or a thousand, if you’re trying to assuage my battered ego? You needn’t worry. I’ve told you. Fortunato’s just not going to engage. As long as he keeps me at a distance, he’s got all the power. He holds all the cards. We could never hope to get to him… which is why I was counting on him having us dragged in front of him.”
“Will ya listen to me for a second?” Regan said. “They’re tearin’ down some wards an’ such, the only things what are keepin’ keep out…”
“All kinds of eldritch horrors and creepy crawlies from beyond time and space, I’m sure,” Lilliana said, getting to her feet. “And I’m sure they’ll all be joining us shortly for a drink… or if not, they’ll be part of the story by the time you tell it to Handy.” She sighed. “Let’s get back to the ship. I suppose I’ll have to be satisfied with whatever damage he did to his bottom line, through his attempts to keep me at arm’s length. I’m almost tempted to do more… but, no. Entirely too many ways that could play into his hand without him doing anything.”
Lilliana pushed her drink away from her stood up. As this action incidentally put the oversized cocktail glass closer to Regan, the mechanic grabbed it and downed the potent concoction before following her. Lilliana picked her path carefully, stepping over the debris and shattered glass. Regan walked straight through it. She snagged mostly-full beer bottles off the tables they passed, one for each hand.
As they stepped out of the bar, the street-like layout of The Meadows shimmered and disappeared, to be replaced by a landscape even more exotic and alien. A thin purple silt blew across hard-packed purple dirt . The sky and the light which filtered through it had a sickly greenish tint. The horizon was dotted with fantastic rock formations, improbably tall and thin pillars and shapes that would have been impossible in Old Earth Standard gravity, shaped by the persistence of the wind.
“No,” Lilliana said, looking around her. “This isn’t possible.”
“Clearly, ya haven’t been drinkin’ nearly enough,” Regan said.
She turned back towards the bar, only to find it had vanished, too. They were on the edge of a vast mesa. Only a few feet behind them was a ledge and a precipitous drop to a desert plain far, far below.
“Unknown world,” Regan said. “Harsh, unsustaining environment. We’re gonna have to be rationin’ our supplies real careful, like.” She chugged the two beers. “Startin’ now.”
“This isn’t an unknown world, Bard,” Lilliana said slowly.
“Oh? What’s it called, then?”
“I don’t know if it has a name,” Lilliana said. “But it’s the first planet I ever set foot on… the first planet I ever laid eyes on, for that matter.”
“Didn’t ask its name,” Regan said. “What do ya call it?”
“We never called it anything,” Lilliana said. “We didn’t need to. It was just… ours.”
“‘Ours’?”
“Fortunato and I,” Lilliana said.
“Tch. I was afraid it was gonna be somethin’ like that,” Regan said.
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