Razg

Seated at the bar on two stools, one to each arse-cheek - the only way he could fit - the massive, bronze-skinned ogre known to most as 'Razg' or 'You Hopeless Goon' listened in contemplative silence to the roaring laughter that shook The Skewered Maiden, chasing seething Chakros out the door. Most assumed Razg was still quite some mental distance away from working out the first joke, and would join in a few hours after it had finished.

After a few more moments of deep thought, Razg rose from his seats with a perilous creak and banged on the bar in friendly fashion to get the cackling innkeeper's attention.

"I buy turn," he rumbled at the orc, pointing back at the booth which Chakros had not quite managed to reach."I pay you ... three coin."

The innkeeper began to protest until he remembered that good old Razg couldn't count to save his life, and that there were actually seven coins lying dwarfed in that enormous palm. Besides, what with all the mirth and mockery still going on, it was likely going to be hard to encourage anyone else to go near a half-orc's leavings - even if he didn't technically get around to leaving her ...

"Okay, Razg," the orc grunted, sniffing and then pocketing the coins (ogres have only a finite number of places to carry things, and even orcs have limits). "Since you're a good customer and all, you can have her for three. But if you break her, you bought her, got it?"

"I got it," decided Razg ponderously, blinking his beady yellow eyes a few more times, and then shuffled around on the spot until he was in no danger of breaking more expensive furniture, thumping his way across the taproom to the curtained alcove where the soft human meat was still waiting.

The human did not move as the hulking, stinking ogre loomed before the curtains, nearly too big to fit through the doorway at all. Her dark eyes were still half-closed, languid and apparently resigned or oblivious to her fate, but closer, more careful attention warned that the deeper glint in those eyes was neither drugged nor truly quiescient: it was alert, watchful, calculating.

"Annieke, it's me," he mouthed at her as he shouldered past the curtain, sketching a quick sign in the air, and she visibly relaxed at the sight of it, unresisting when he 'pushed' her down onto the floor of the booth.

"Thank the Gods," she hissed up at him. "This was a terrible idea. Whoever told you Lok'Saug has a kink for squishy humans might be right, but he hasn't been in here even once - probably gets his own brought to his place."

"Not that I'd be very happy to switch with you, Annieke, but Lok'Saug is giving us all the shits at the moment, trust me. I haven't even got near that paranoid pissdrinker, and Esser was finally too careless - they got him last night."

"Viilse! They got him?"

"Still staked out by the commander's 'office' now, getting picked at by those ugly vultures. Not to mention the birds. Whimper a bit here, could you? I don't want to end up pegged out next to him."

Annieke, ever the consummate actress, struck up a medley of strangled groans and muffled wails of anguish. He'd heard far, far worse in the meagre months he'd been spying here, but at such close range it made all the hairs on his ugly body - gods, when will they finally give me mine back?! - stand on end.

"It's getting too dangerous for any of us to stay here," he whispered to her under her agonised cries. "From what I'm hearing, there's a few more who're going to take Lok'Saug a bit more seriously now that he's actually found one of his ex-imaginary spies. It's only a matter of time before he gets some of his scouts to poke around further afield, and they will find base. I think he'll soon start bringing some mages in to give him a hand here, too. Then we're really screwed."

"I'm screwed if I don't make myself scarce tonight," she muttered back, breaking up her performance with a choked note of despair that made his skin crawl further. "Multiple times, I imagine. I know what you've all been saying behind my back since I volunteered, but I don't actually have a thing for greenskins, and two blushing goblin boys were enough."

He couldn't smile. He knew why she still felt able to joke, and he knew she was wrong. "I brought you a knife, Annieke. I hope it helps ... somehow."

"What do you mean, a knife?" Her dark eyes flared. "I thought you'd come to get me out of here!"

"How?" he asked - a single, blunt, lethal syllable.

For a moment she opened her mouth as if to scream, shout, protest. Then she simply reached out and took the orcish knife he'd removed from his rear loincloth binding and proffered to her. The look in her eyes suggested she was considering using it on him.

"You always were a stone cold monster," she told him in a low, loathing murmur, a voice that trembled not so much with fear as with the suppressed urge to murder. "You belong with these animals."

The smirk that spread across his lips would have been no less twisted on his real face than the ogrish one he wore. "To be honest, Annieke, in all my minglings, I've had a very hard time telling the difference between the people of Gilden before and after the fires from the sky. I'll leave it completely up to you to strike a blow for our monsters or theirs, shall I?"

He climbed off her and left the booth when she didn't stab him, hearing her start sobbing behind him. He couldn't tell whether she was just in character or not. One rarely could with Annieke.

The Skewered Maiden was still full of hooting, jeering laughter for that uppity half-orc weakling who'd been sent out with his tail between his legs. Initially ignored amongst all the general ongoing merriment, Razg stomped across the room from the curtained alcove to pound his meaty, polymorphed fist forcefully down on the bar counter, hard enough this time to split the timber and send mugs flying - making the innkeeper yelp in angry consternation as one landed on his foot, and causing the no-longer-chuckling ogrish bodyguards to hulk up menacingly to him.

"Youse is just sellin rag dollies," he growled across the bar at the innkeeper in the sudden silence, ignoring the other ogres. "Even urd not want dat one. I go Skittikut's place - goblin make more squeak."

Paid for by a half-orc, who were the weakest of the weak; turned down by an ogre, who often made do with convenient livestock if time and needs must. Annieke was getting some seriously bad press for the Skewered Maiden today. Perhaps at this rate they'd just go ahead and kill her.

Let it never be said I don't try to take care of my colleagues, he thought with savage dark humour as he lumbered back out into the essentially unchanged streets of Gilden. He was dying to get out of the city - as Razg the Ragpicker and as Torallen Sallinger alike - but there was still someone else he had to find and have words with first ...