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Raven ducks away from Jule's hand with a smirk, only to thrust her head against the woman's palm with a loud purr. "I had that totally under control!" Her purring dissolves into laughter, then that dies too as she leans on Jule's chest with a tired sigh.

"I'm ready to move whenever and wherever you are."

Sometime over the night, Drake does roll over and wrap his arms around Victi, grumbling incoherently in his sleep.

Ever the morning person, he later rises with the songbirds. He blinks awake to catch himself snuggling who is effectively his boss, who still sleeps peacefully like she finds this acceptable. That, or Victi's a deep sleeper and he's screwed when she gets up.

That's enough to get him throwing the sheets aside and jolting out of bed. Now standing, he glances back toward her then turns away, busying himself with fixing his clothes and brushing away his bed-head best he can with his fingers.

Victi's a pretty deep sleeper, but sudden movement is enough to get her to wake up.

Given that none of her wards or detectors had woken her, she wasn't sure what the emergency was.

She rolls over, looking at him sleepily and, at the sight of how his hair and clothes were experiencing heavy static cling, bemusedly to ask, "Something happen?"

She could feel by the slight matting of her fur that he'd ended up snuggling her, which was fine. Most of her kind enjoyed moderate physical contact, and she was no exception. Besides, she'd allowed it. He hadn't done anything untoward (by her standards), either, based on how all of his innards were presumably not liquified.

Perfect, saved her having to hire a masseuse if she got touch starved.

"Anyway, sleep did good things for recharging my tails," she says, rolling to sit on the side of the bed and stretch out, "today seems like a good day to figure out what we're doing."

Alastor laughs at the exchange between Jules and Raven. It was good to see the group in better spirits. "Under control, eh?"
Turning to their next destination, Alastor stretched and rested his hands in his coat pockets. "Alright then! Homeward we go! Fer the third time now, I think? Hard to believe it, but I actually miss Urug's ugly mug." He laughed at his own comment before beginning to march towards their destination. "Right! Let's go."

"Well we will see him soon." She smiles warmly as she feels Raven lean on her chest. "Is someone tired? You're free to sleep wherever you like on my if youd like.." she says softly as she follows Alastor.

"Uh..." Drake, a long-haired, rather heavily-furred Chimera, runs his fingers frantically over his scalp, tries to smooth his clothes and tame his wild, uncomfortably clinging-to-everything chest-fluff. All with no success. "No, no, no. Why don't you-Aaaarrrgh!"

Giving up, he throws his hands out in frustration and turns around with a low growl or groan. "Yeah! What the hell did you do to me?"

He slips his jacket off, then grabs his shirt and pulls it up over his head. Drake has quite a chiseled figure...which is at present cloaked by soft, tawny fur from the lower chest down flying every possible direction once he removes the shirt it had grown so attached to, turning the man from a deadly assassin into an angry ball of puff.

The mercenary, holding his clothes at arm's length, releases a defeated sigh. "You know what? Nevermind. Let's...right. Figure out what the hell we're doing."

He tosses the shirt away and crosses to the other bed where he'd left his gear. He proceeds to open it and start looking for something.

Victi's response to Drake's awkward indignation is mad cackling. "Oh, the perks of electrokinesis," she says with a post-laughter sigh once she catches her breath, "Yeah, today's a good day for progress. Enchanting, I think. That's light enough that I should get more siphoning time in."

First though, breakfast. She probably needed to hunt since they were out of cash now, but that was fine. That, or find a way to get money....

"Hey Drake," she asks, "What's an easy way to get paid around here. Need more food money, and I'd like to keep murder, mugging, and burglary as last resorts. Spellcasting, maybe? I should be good to get us teleporting again, so most places work if I can get a good image of them"

Adriannu listened as Lisa further insisted that they should head to the library before looking for Raven. The child still didn't look happy about this, but eventually sighed. "...Fine, but I demand your shard if we do this. After all, the last place we need a shard is in a place that Victi may already be going. That way if she does show up, you won't be in danger, or rather any more than anyone else there will be as long as you are smart enough not to get caught with the books if you find them. As for me I'll hang out somewhere else in an agreed upon location away from the library to keep them safe."

She then held out her hand and flashed the chimera a hard look that heavily suggested against trying to argue with her, though to be fair, there was a bit of logic in her words. Should she hand it over, Adriannu would take it, grab a small pouch out of her bag and a strip of cloth from her bag. After wrapping the shard in the cloth, she'd put the shard in the pouch and tie it to her belt. Maybe later, she could fashion a crude sheathe for this shard like for one for her own, but that would have to come later.

Now once the ship landed, she'd slowly exit down the ramp. Then should Lisa have not handed over her shard yet, Adriannu would repeat her demand and bring her open palm even closer to the Chimera's face, making it very clear that she wasn't backing down.

(Not sure how big Lisa's shard is. Hopefully it's not too big. xD)

"Oh? I guess I still am." Raven laughs. "I'm supposed to get sixteen hours of that stuff, y'know what I mean?"

With that, her jaws part in a long, tired yawn. "Though I've got a bad feeling that-" Another yaaawwwn, "-this shard business is gonna screw up my schedule." Her words drawl more and more as she finishes her sentence. Then she tucks her head between her paws and starts to snooze again.

Drake pulls a comb from his bag and continues fighting with his hair as Victi recovers from a fit of laughter which does nothing to assuage his frustration. What does help is the mention of enchantment; his ears perk up and smiles until a scrap of hair falls over his face and tries to cling to his nose. He snarls at it and brushes it away before answering her question about money.

"So no theft? If you're feeling lucky or like you can get away cheating, I'd try gambling. Spend a day on the dock playing that cup game or roll some dice. And as for spellcasting? I guess if you were to sell simple enchantments or repair stuff for folks, maybe you can make money fast." He stops himself there; he has another idea...the vixen's certainly pretty enough for it, but it'd either fly over her head or get his head bitten off.

"Theft is blunt and.... hmm inefficiently cruel with no real payoff besides the goods. Dishonest gambling is better, I like playing with illusions, but it takes a lot of moving parts," she replies, casting a simple grounding spell to normalize Drake's electric charge. Over the next few moments, everything should go back to normal. She'd had most of her fun with the static charge. No point making her guide like her too much less.

"I could give an example about the complexities of falsifying a die roll, I guess, but the more pertinent point is that I'm mostly thinking about the fact that I'm broke and hungry, and want to solve both of those problems," she explains sassily, "A day of gambling doesn't get me food before mid-morning, but a few magical favours might! I could also try making leaves seem like coins or whatever, but that also feels a bit cheap. That said, it's a bit of a rite of passage I haven't done yet, so that's worth it. Part of why I'm paying you in enchantments, by the way. Those kinds of things are easier to make than falsify hard enough to field-test."

Drake breathes a sigh of relief as his hair and fur fall where it all should go. He laughs a little and runs the comb over his head a few more times to make sure it's all under control.

"I'll roll with whatever you prefer to do. Disguising leaves as coins, or gambling, or- uh, I know we need money, but you're built for hunting, aren't you? And I know how to make snares," he shrugs. "We can hunt this morning and get coin later."

"Sure, as long as you're fine with raw or know how to cook things," she replies, standing up and walking toward the door of the room, "I'll get the Shriker, you.... do whatever you need to do for us to go properly, and then we can go looking for something edible."

Optimizing schedules was..... always tricky. Food had to come first, but Victi's thoughts raced through various orders of action. Deal with money second, or get enchanting? Probably money, in case she needed to buy reagents or rent time at an enchantery. Okay, where did research fit into this? Some artifacts of that power level were actually sensitive to relative position of celestial bodies enough for date of use to matter, or at least location. Knowing that, or any other conditions, would be important.... Sadly she had not a clue who would have that kind of info. Cults, private collectors, secret archives.... you never knew.

Ugh, planning was always a complete pain.

"Uh...What about your safety?" Lisa asks. The objection is impulsive, an instinct. While objectively she can easily acknowledge that Adriannu is just as if not more competent than she is, the chimera still strives to keep the child in her company safe from harm.

And that involves, in her mind, keeping her in sight. Letting Adriannu scamper off with not one, but two shards to wait alone at some "agreed upon location" sets off so many alarms. The knee-jerk reply has absolutely nothing to do with the dawning realization that the shard was left in her backpack which, to her knowledge, they'd abandoned in the flight from her ruined woodland cabin.

On the other hand, her face going white, then flushing with color as she spits a curse from under her breath has everything to do with realizing her shard is gone.

"Sorry," she steps back from the girl's second request. "Uh....I think- Raven must"- she must, or else it surely would have been returned to them with Adriannu's daggers...

"The shard is in Raven's care." That doesn't reassure Lisa at all, but hopefully it will put Adriannu at ease. It sounds better- and is hopefully more true -than "I lost it" or "I left it behind."

Time had passed. Alastor had focused on keeping in view of the roads to avoid getting lost in the woods. He was eager to get into town and finally have some questions answered by his closest accomplice. As the town came into view before him, he smiled. But it was not to last.

Standing at the entrance to town was the last guard he'd wanted to see. Brandis. A man with all too much of a drive for the law. Bastard was by the books and unshakeable. Worst of all, Alastor had some run-ins with the guy in the past, and knew the guy was good at his job, albeit arrogant at times.

Stopping a good distance from the gate, Alastor raised his hand over his shoulder. "Hold up. We have an issue. I don't think we're getting in this way."