Flashback Part 6: New Plan

[Karsynwa]

6th of Fall, 490 AV

It was night, and there was a faint source of light coming from a classroom down the hall. Karsynwa was running a little late for their lesson because of a mix up with his patrols. He had inadvertently taken a later shift so he’d only just recently returned to the Kuvay’nas headquarters to return his equipment before running on over to where their class was held. The small room was the only source of light in the dim hallway.

As he approached the door, Karsynwa tried walking slower, creeping along the edge of the wall. Nearing the threshold he tensed to take a peek around the corner. “You haven’t nearly gotten the hang of that yet.” Arrel’s voice rang out from within before he could. Karsynwa’s shoulders slouched an he walked in the rest of the way. “I thought I might pull one over on you with it getting late.”

“Speaking of.” Arrel looked up at him. Karsynwa shrugged, and sat down behind his lap desk. “I got put in with the wrong group when I showed up this morning. We trained for a lot longer than I expected before finally going out on patrol. I only just got back.”

“Ah, and here I was thinking you had lost track of time at the gate again.” Arrel said grinning to himself as he thumbed through the stack of parchment on his desk. Karsynwa quirked an eyebrow. “What do you mean by that?”

“Which? You loosing track of the Cerulean or getting caught snooping by the barmaids at the Blue Bull?” Arrel asked, coming around the long table to stand in front of Karsynwa so he had to look up higher to make eye contact. Karsynwa considered the point for a moment before responding. “I wasn’t caught by any maids.” He bluffed, though there was an unmistakable crack in his voice that made him wince. “They just offered me a drink.” He added weakly.

Arrel chuckled and deposited a sheaf of parchment in front of him. “You need to work on that too. Aside from being able to control your voice, you look like a rabbit caught in a vice every time you lie. If you want to persuade people you need to sound confident. Now tell me what you saw at the gates.”

Karsynwa had been on the verge of asking a question, though presently he held his tongue to consider his mentor’s request. Aside from the Cerulean and the barmaids, the only other thing he had noticed where the drykas coming into the city. “Some drykas came into the city. They tended to stick to their color which I later found out from the maids denotes their clan. The colors seem to relate to gemstones and they tend to get along with the other clans so far as I could tell.” Karsynwa scratched his chin, remembering something else intriguing he had seen. “Their horses followed them around without any straps to guide them, and they had a harness across their backs.”

WC: 502

[Karsynwa]

“Very perceptive” Arrel said, adjusting to sit cross legged in front of the table. “The drykas have a way with their horses that even I don’t completely understand. They live off the sea of grass, and occasionally come here to trade for things that are scarce out there. Their clans, as you called them, tend to specialize in a certain kind of work so they have to cooperate with the others in order for the whole to function. That harness you saw was a special type of saddle called a yvas, though you will never see anyone besides them using it. Simply too hard to learn how to use one of those things unless you’ve spent every day on a horse like they have.”

“That explains why those around the gates seemed familiar with them. They even greeted each other like old friends in some cases.” Karsynwa mused as he scrawled some of this down on the parchment paper in front of him. “What are all of the clans by the way?”

“Opal for their healers, Diamond for their warriors, Ruby for their crafters, Emerald for their hunters, Topaz for their leaders, Amethyst for their weavers, and the Sapphire clan is a bit of a mystery. I suspect they are the spies of the drykas for not much is known about what they do for their community, and they seldom come to the city to trade for anything beyond the necessities.” Arrel brought his hands together in front of him. “What would you do to try and get more information from them. Provided that regular observation was not enough.”

Karsynwa considered that proposition while he hurried to jot down the rest of the information about the clans. From what he had heard about spies so far, he knew that it paid to be secret so uncovering more information about the Sapphire clan certainly seemed to be a mountain of a task. He decided to start simple. Setting down his quill, he looked up at Arrel.

“I’d find a way to ingratiate myself to them. Gain their trust. Maybe then they would share some things with me.”

“And do you have a plan for that yet?” Arrel asked. Karsynwa shook his head, so his mentor continued. “What if I were to tell you if you rubbed some predator scent off on a man, and sent him by their horses you could spook them. How would you use such a situation to your advantage?

Karsynwa chewed absentmindedly at the bottom of his lip. “Well I would run the kelvic off, and then apologize to them. Something like I’m sorry, he didn’t know any better.”

“Not bad, though your delivery could use some work. That was a decent first step towards taking a more active approach to intelligence gathering. Which is something you’ll find yourself needing when you’ve gleaned all you can from the more passive methods. You have to make sure you plan accordingly however. Like making sure that stable hand got away so he didn’t talk to the drykas. Certainly wouldn’t want them finding out about your little ploy.” Arrel said with a broad grin.

WC: 524

[Karsynwa]

“What if I asked you to get a man to come out of a tavern?” Arrel continued.

“What for?”

“So we can capture him.” Arrel said.

That was a more difficult question. Karsynwa was far from confident in his ability to talk the man out of there and nothing sprang to mind as a way of luring him through other means. Well, nothing asides from the obvious. A duel might get the man away from the place, however it left a bitter taste in his mouth thinking along those lines. It was far from the strict honor code and discipline he had been raised with. Yet so much of what he was learning now tended to walk that line. Karsynwa had been okay with that so long as he stood on the right side of that line, though he did wonder if he had it in him to cross it. Would that make him one of those Ceruleans?

“I could try to provoke the man to come out after me. Challenge him to a duel in the Tuvya Sasaran, and then after we could grab him.” Karsynwa stated hesitantly though even as he said it, he stumbled seeing the look on his mentors face.

Arrel chuckled and shook his head. “I get it, but you are sometimes going to need to put your pride to the side if you want to do well with your field work. We obviously couldn’t take the risk of letting you duel him, too many ways that could go wrong, and a good chance he wouldn’t be in a condition to talk even if you did win. Also, who is to say his friends wouldn’t come out with him. Strong odds on that I bet. Try again.”

Karsynwa clenched his teeth, then remembered the waitresses. How easily they had coaxed him inside and he considered that the same might go for others. Actually hadn’t Arrel also said that there were far fewer women to men in Riverfall? That made him considerably more certain of a scheme he got cooking up in his mind that borrowed from all they learned over the past few days.

“I would send a woman in to coax him out. He could hardly deny a lady that wants a little privacy, and she would hardly have to be a great actor. Maybe make sure she has an almost empty pitcher of wine as well so when she has got him out there she can insist on going back for a bit to get them more wine. Then we grab him.” Karsynwa said.

Arrel looking like he could go either way for a few moments before he finally relieved him with a grin. “You are assuming a lot of things with this man, but yes, this is a good approach. Also, good looking out for the asset just in case things go rough with the capture. Now that we have the man, where are we taking him for our little chat?”

WC: 499

[Karsynwa]

“Can I see a map?” Karsynwa asked even as a pit was forming in his stomach. He didn’t like the turn this was taking, but honestly, he had been expecting this for a long while now. Time to see if he had the mettle to continue this kind of work. Arrel obliged by laying out a map for him, and pointed to the Kulkukan as the tavern in question. Karsynwa nodded, remembering the place well. How busy it had been with both humans and Akalaks. He scanned the surrounding area for potential routes for them to follow when another question occurred to him.

“I assume we wouldn’t want the place linked to us. The militia I mean.” Karsynwa asked, his voice unsure as he looked up. Arrel simply nodded so Karsynwa looked back down at the map. Ideally he wanted somewhere secluded for this, so he traced his finger up to a private set of residences.

“Any chance we could get our hands on one of those? The privacy of the underground is rather appealing.” Arrel arched an eyebrow and shrugged. “Anything is possible with the right plan in motion. You could check if they are in residence or currently out of the city for instance, whether they have any family living nearby, or you could come up with an excuse for a reason they would need to leave their residence for a couple of days. In this case, lets make things simple and say one of the residents is throughly afraid of rats so help some make a nest there. Now you’ve got an excuse to be alone in the home while you deal with the infestation. However I’d counsel you to look for a place with at least two entrances. You don’t want to get trapped if things go wrong for you, and you never know when they will. You can only plan accordingly.” Arrel said, suddenly solemn. To Kasrynwa it looked like he was remembering something, and he left that uncommented on. If his mentor wanted to share what he was thinking of the man would on his own time.

“Alright, so I’ll choose one of these on the edge of a slope. They are rather large sitting on the corner and will hopefully have more than one entrance. If not, I would search among these residents closest to the tavern until I found one that did.” Karsynwa realized he was forgetting something. A thing quite important given the scheme of things. “I suppose I am getting ahead of myself. Do I know the dispositions of the guards? Where they are patrolling and what the path looks like this time of night?”

“I certainly hope so, but yes, those are definitely the sorts of questions you would want to have answered before embarking on this mission. Otherwise no matter how cunning your plan was, it would have all been for nothing for you to get caught here.”

WC: 490

[Karsynwa]

Karsynwa nodded, and considered the map again. “So for the sake of the scenario, which positions are the guards patrolling from on this night, and what is the least traveled pathway? Also, how many guards?”

Arrel pointed out the positions, and Karsynwa sketched a less than direct route between them. It wasn’t what he liked, but it felt necessary to avoid a chance at detection. Sensing he might need to plan for another such contingency, he posed his next question.

“Would I have a team with me on this one? If so, I’d like one of them to be scouting ahead along our route while one hangs behind to see if anyone has come searching for our guy.” Karsynwa said, growing in confidence as the plan seemed to be starting to come together.

“Good. You might also to have someone waiting at the residence to make sure no one has entered in your absence.” Arrel said, leaning back away from the map.

“Okay, so say we did that and got him there, what now.” Karsynwa asked hesitantly, almost not wanting to voice his suspicion. He knew what the answer was, but he didn’t really want to hear it.

“Well, depending on how forthcoming he is will depend on how hard the questioning is. We call it interrogation, but we won’t get into any of that tonight. That could be a school in and of itself and requires you to be more than just good with your words. You have to be able to scare him, and to back up that fear with pain if necessary.”

Karsynwa frowned, and Arrel flinched at the response.

“Thats why we have to leave these things sometimes to the Ceruleans because normal Akalak often don’t have the stomach for it. I urge you to try to understand the necessity for it though. This is to protect our city, all of our missions are for that one goal ultimately. Would you rather a merciless Cerulean do the job, or someone with honor and discipline who doesn’t do more than he has to when extracting the information.” Arrel said calmly as Karsynwa felt his eyes upon him.

Karsynwa chewed on that for a moment before he looked up at his mentor. “Its just not something I ever saw myself doing. Not that I haven’t been enjoying the training so far, its just a lot to comprehend at once.”

Arrel nodded. “Honor is a lot more complex than they teach at the school. There are shades of grey with it. You have to be cognizant of that fact when you are doing something you might otherwise balk at for the good of the city. Weight your options always, and if you have no choice but this course to preserve innocent lives, then there is no dishonor in that. You are doing what you must for the good of the community.” His mentor sighed, and then standing up, walked over to his table. “That’s it for today. Tomorrow we are going to start your first field assignment.”

Karsynwa stood up abruptly. “Really?” His excitement was clear in his voice.

Arrel turned with a smile. “Yes. So make sure you get plenty of sleep because we are going to be up quite early.”

WC: 543

[Reed]

Grades Awarded!

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Karsynwa

Skills

• Intelligence: 5
• Rhetoric: 1
• Socialization: 5
• Stealth: 1
• Tactics/Strategy: 1

Lores

• Stealth: Noticed for making noise
• Rhetoric: Voice cracking portrays an lack of confidence
• Persuasion: Try not to look shocked when trying to convince someone
• Lore - Drykas Clan Colors
• Lore - Drykas Clan Gemstones
• Opal Clan: Known for their healers
• Diamond Clan: Known for their warriors
• Ruby Clan: Known for their craftsmen
• Emerald Clan: Known for their hunters
• Topaz Clan: Known for their leaders
• Amethyst Clan: Known for their weavers
• Intelligence: Why you should scout out a route before you use it
• Tactics/Strategy: Leaving someone behind to watch the safe house

Awards & Retribution


Notes