***
The loud, corny music stopped every time something or someone was flung against the merry, dead-drunk band of musicians, but it quickly resumed with every round of drinks that was announced to be on the house. Apparently, no-one knew what the tavern was called or if it even had a name, and no-one cared just as long as the grog kept coming. As someone had scribbled on one wall, the grog must flow.
“So you haven’t heard an elven tribe from warmer climates? Or maybe about a missing mammal of the Laporidae family? A rather peculiar mammal with strange, perhaps even pernicious powers? You might’ve heard a thing or two about a thaumaturgic device in the form of a floating, ornate metallic chair. Have you? We are very interested in procuring them, for a more than modest amount of money. Even the elves,” said Lernea and stared at the ogre meaningfully, letting her words sink in with as much a feeling of innuendo as possible.
She laid herself back on the rather uncomfortable chair and tried to smile wryly. The rather uncomfortable seat coupled with the unruly, ugly company at their table split her smile in something between a harrowed cringe and a mentally retarded grin.
“Wha’at did she ’ay?” asked the ogre through its cave of a mouth, its teeth a purely decorative add-on, long ago lost and never found. The ogre was the fat, grey-green sort; a typical example of its kind. Its rotund belly was a good indicator that actually chewing one’s food was not a prerequisite for most ogres. Especially those that were usually employed as muscle in the various nefarious trading agreements that took place all too commonly in Tallyflop.
“She’s asking, as far as I can recall, if you’ve ever seen a flying bunny or a flaming chair. Or a bunch of dark-skinned hoots wearing strips of leather instead of normal clothes. Something along those lines,” explained Winceham and filled his mouth with what was left of his drink. After making a show of sloshing the house special, the last bottle of Mythriam’s Loxsene Famous Grog around his mouth, he swallowed it succesfully; which was, without throwing up.
Winceham seemed to feel a bit queasy for a moment before he fell off his stool. Lernea scoffed at him and barely spared Wince a fleeting yet chastising gaze; she returned her full, undivided attention to the ogre. She smiled awkwardly.
“Well? Have you at least heard about a gang called the Culprits?” she asked with her eyebrow furrowed in a way that implied a conniving, insidious sort of discussion was taking place, while in fact it was more of a conniving, insidious monologue. The ogre was busy scratching a layer of crust made out of some sort of fungi on its belly; it completely missed the delicately contrived facial expression on Lernea’s face.
“Two dozzin coin fo’ a beatin’; two times an’ one dat fo’ a killin’.”
“We don’t want you to hurt or kill anyone. We just want some information,” said Lernea calmly, still believing a measure of rapport could be achieved with someone possessing the intellectual capacity of a log.
“I don’ do that. Info-irmation. Nah, I doesn’t,” replied the ogre, pausing for a moment of reassurance and nodding to itself profusely.
“Well then, do you know of anyone who does?” asked Lernea patiently. The ogre seemed to give it a bit of thought. It scratched its belly once more and peeled off a piece of skin.
“Yea,” replied the ogre at length. Lernea’s veneer of delicately handling the whole information gathering task was falling apart.
“Well, what’s his name?”
She nearly screeched the words, but the ogre seemed dead set on dealing with its fungi problem rather than do business.
“I dunno. Even if I did, which I don’, I tol’ ya, I don’ do ’fomation an’ stuff.”
Lernea sighed. She was a staunch believer in diplomacy, but it looked like they were wasting their time. She was about to grab Winceham from his accessory belt and drag him away with her, when she realised the halfuin was actually standing right next to the ogre’s waist, looking at the top of his game and not at all positively smashed.
“Here’s a piece of thirty, ya cock-a-doodly-doo. I want you to hit yourself in the head a couple of times, real good though. You know, for good measure.”
The ogre took the coin, nodded appreciatively and eagerly said, “Aw’ight.”
It then indeed proceeded to hit himself in the head with its powerful fists; the ogre’s eyes went rolling for a while and its head swerved this way and that, the eyeballs trying to remain in their sockets. He raised a blotched hand in front of his face; he had two fingers raised. He then hit itself in the head once more. The ogre was nearly passed out but it stood its ground on its chair, which comprised of a big rock; imported furniture, the good stuff. At length, after it could focus its eyes once more, it spoke once more. There was a recognizable amount of hurt in its voice:
“’At hoit. A lot.”
Winceham patted the ogre gently on one bucklered knee with a metallic pang. “I bet it did, here’s another ten-piece for your zeal,” he said reassuringly, dropped the coin on the table and went on. “Listen, do you have any idea who might’ve ordered a hit on this blue-green ogre a while back? Say a minute or so earlier?”
The ogre took the coins, didn’t bother to count it and nodding like its neck had turned into jelly it said without thinking about any of the words:
“Ask Lenny the Rat. He be ovah at Lemmy’s. Tell’im ‘Ken sent me’.”
Winceham nodded to Lernea with a smile and offered his hand to the ogre. The gesture went unnoticed, as the ogre was now eating some of the pinkish fungi shaped like tiny carrots that was growing on its belly. “It’s been less than pleasurable doing business with you,” said Winceham nevertheless and the ogre replied with a nod and a vile-smelling burp.
“Likewoyz.”
Winceham bowed slightly and he showed Lernea the exit. As if in a trance, she slowly got up from her seat and straightened the bow strung on her back. They began jostling their way through the mostly drunken, massive crowd that consisted entirely of sailors and their associated ilk, with the exception of a group of space-turtlemen who looked a lot like empty shells after all the time they’d been trying to get a drink.
“I don’t understand,” asked Lernea; she sounded utterly dumbfounded at how Winceham had been able to get something of value out of the wholly unsanitary and quite brainless ogre.
“That’s how you do business in the streets,” replied Winceham, as they calmly walked past a blunderbuss duel, right before both duelists’ guns exploded in their respective faces. Lernea was still throwing looks behind her shoulder at the ogre.
“But, he could’ve told me! I would have paid him to tell me. I told him I would!”
“Ogres are genderless, mind you. The ogre doesn’t sell information. Not that it really could, anyway,” Winceham commented and his face missed a flying glass pitcher for an inch or so, purely by luck. Lernea didn’t even notice, but she did sound rather miffed.
“He could’ve at least told us who does sell information!”
“No, that would constitute selling information,” replied Winceham waving a finger. Lernea was right behind him, trying to make sense out of that when a heavily bearded character with a funny hat sweeped overhead riding a pony-on-a-stick, suspended from a chandelier on fire, shouting insults at someone named Bobby.
“But he just told us to ask that Rat character!” insisted Lernea, failing to grasp the delicate intricacies of Tallyflop’s criminal business underworld.
“Yeah, he did, but that was a tip. A matter of professional courtesy. We did business together so as a tip, an added bonus if you like, he gave us a bit of information. He did us a favor,” said Winceham and picked up someone else’s drink from a messy, knife-ridden bloody table were noone seemed to be breathing. Lernea kept following Winceham blindly, trusting he really knew a way towards the exit.
“Now if I understand this correctly, you’re saying that he wouldn’t sell us the information, but it was fine for him to just give it away for free?” cried out Lernea as they neared the music band and t
he exit of the nameless bar.
“Nothing’s really free. We did pay him thirty pieces of coin,” said Winceham and downed the cup in his hand in one go.
“Forty pieces! And that was for an entirely different job!” cried Lernea and flung her arms wide in frustration. Inadvertently, someone’s parrot was knocked out cold and fell in another man’s rum-soup; the man thought the parrot was just another side dish and idly flipped the dead bird over.
“The ten-piece was a tip. We paid him to hit himself, yes. But it did get the job done, didn’t it?” said Winceham, smiling triumphantly as they finally walked outside the tavern, anointed in a cloud of smoke, gunpowder and grog fumes. A single sign outside the otherwise unassuming establishment read ‘B-Warez’. Lernea shook her head and shrugged looking suddenly powerless. She had given up on any hope of understanding the logic behind what had just transpired.
“That’s just plain crazy!”
“It is, isn’t it? You’re getting the hang of what business is like,” said Winceham with a wry grin. Once a breeze of cold air touched his face though, he crumbled down on the wooden floor of the boardwalk. A moment later he was licking the wooden planks like a brain-damaged cat.
“By Svarna! You’re inebriated to the bone! I thought you were putting on an act!” said Lernea with shocked disapproval.
“It’s a medical condition! I’m not wasted or anything! I just blank out tempofurtively! Snot going to reed bad, eels it?” shouted Winceham without being in any position to sound believable.
“You need to get sobered up before we do anything else,” said Lernea and forced Winceham back on his feet.
“What? No, there’s not enough.. Not enough time.. We need drinkses! We need to get another drink at Lemmy’s!” blabbered Winceham, looking hurt, angry and crushed at the same time, even though it looked like he still wanted to lick the wooden planks like there was no tomorrow.
“There’s bound to be a bath house around here somewhere,” said Lernea and scanned the signs and lantern posts around them. Winceham looked at her with a half-asleep, out-of-focus look that he rarely employed. It was as if he was trying to ascertain whether he wasn’t just imagining things.
“That’s not a half-bad idea at all,” he said with a wide, lopsided grin. Lernea thought it was weird of Winceham to actually agree about taking a bath, of all things.
A few minutes later, she was about to realise bath houses in places like Tallyflop involved a lot more than just bathing.