"Very few flames are ever truly gutted you know? Might need a new waxing, or a careful insertion of the proper wick..." lora's knowledge of candle making is crap "The point is... She was here when you needed her."
"Nah, that fire's one that's not gonna start again. Trust me. Amery's just came to give me the keys. She owned this place before it went under." Gattlebee takes another drag. "We gonna stand here all day? Thought you guys were in a hurry."
The twinkle in lora's eyes doesn't leave but she nods, and looks over the building briefly before gesturing for him to open.
Crystal takes the opportunity to reload her pistol while the others prepare to move.
The small tasting room features a short bar to the east with four stools and shelves full of various bottles. A small table and two chairs stand by the western window. A single wooden door exits to the east, next to the bar.
Two clockworks shaped like fermenting kegs stand by the door, but they whir to life as you enter!
”F@&&!” Royken curses. He fires his scattergun, reloads, and shoots again!
Beer pours out of the holes Royken blasted in one clockwork, but it trundles forward. In a friendly, modulated voice, it says, ”Hello! Would you like a free sample?” The incongruous greeting momentarily distracts Royken, and the clockwork clobbers him!
The second clockwork attacks as well, but Royken’s armor protects him.
"Um... Yes?" Lora says in a bit of shock but follows with "Hey Tubbuckets, stop hitting him!" following her words with a discharge from her pistol.
Crystal responds by drawing her dagger, circling around to flank one on Royken, and swinging!
Eva moves around the strange clockworks, her arm already crackling with electricity as she slams her fist on the ground, releasing the energy on them.
Lora begins her song and shoots the damaged clockwork. Crystal moves around and drives her blade deep into the brewer's gears. Then Eva moves in and unleashes an electric explosion! The damaged clockwork collapses.
Royken bashes the second clockwork with his gun. It retaliates, grabbing him with its legs. "Have another round!" its voice box crackles cheerily as it shoves its spigot in the dwarf's mouth and force feeds him the beer inside of it! He gurgles and sputters but suffers no deleterious effects.
Crystal moves to flank the other clockwork and stabs twice!
Eva shudders of thinking how stale that beer was. She then readies her arm and bashes at the machine twice!
"Oh... that's just... inappropriate" Lora says about the forced hosing, as she loads her pistol, then fires at the tub.
Lora blasts a big hole in the clockwork brewer, then Crystal slips behind it and severs a leg with a critical hit! A final smash from Eva finishes off the construct!
Royken coughs, curses, and sputters as he rubs at his wounds.
"Those things REALLY wanted to serve you." Lora fusses over the battered dwarf. "Okay hold still and I'll sing to you." a diddy about a drunken bedpost comes to mind, for some reason.
"Are those things what we came for?" she asks Gattlebee in between verses.
"This look like cold storage to you?" Gattlebee counters. "Patch him up and let's keep going."
The door behind the bar leads into an enormous room that features smooth stone floors covered with dust, and a catwalk ten feet high leading around the south and west walls of the room. Giant covered vats and metal containers fill the space; a five-foot-high platform leads to four vats in the western side of the room. Various doors exit the room to the west, north, and east.
The catwalk around the room was designed for reaching the tops of the vats to add ingredients, performing tests on the contents, drawing samples, and so forth. It’s still in fine repair, as are most of the vats. Two of the four on the left are labeled “mash,” and the other two “kettle.” On the south wall, three of the containers are sealed and labeled “ferment,” while one has several metal pipes connected to it and is labeled “still.” Each vat has a large release valve on the bottom for draining liquid, often with a hose or control apparatus attached.
Most of the doors here are locked--Gattlebee only has a key to the outside doors. The only door that is unlocked leads into the brewery's warehouse.
Lora gives Gattlebee an indignant look at being ordered about, but she was already in the process of doing exactly what he was ordering. Stopping would both be bad for their survivability and make her look like a petulant child. So she shrugs and continues.
At locked doors, she prods a little "Your former lady love only had the outside key? That and a basic desire to know, begs me to ask, Why she had the key in the first place?" she talks while assuming Crystal with a magnificent set of tools will work a lock or two or three for them.
Eva also heals Royken with her blasting herbs, since they are pressed for time.
Crystal gets to work on the locks.
The closet pops open easily, but the workroom takes a couple of tries.
Lora hovers as Crystal's graceful fingers diddle and daddle locks open. On the last she leans a little closer and whispers "with that amazing finger work you must be rather popular at parties" what kind of parties she is talking about is left vague.
"Told you, she used to own this place," Gattlebee grumbles in response to Lora's question.
Once the cold storage room is unlocked, Gattlebee heads inside. A misty vapor fills this frigid room. A thin layer of ice coats the walls, and several small icicles hang from the ceiling. Large metal drums stand against the back wall of this chamber, while several old crates of freezer-burned ingredients clog up the remainder of the space.
A gently glowing, light-blue orb encased in several metal bands hangs from the ceiling in the center of the room.
Gattlebee rifles through the old crates. He seems to know exactly where Amery put the thing he wants. He withdraws his hand from a pile of rock-hard, rime‑crusted onions and holds up a silver wedding band. “Ice cold,” he says, without a trace of irony, before pocketing the accessory. "Okay. We can look around more if you want, but I'm ready to go."
"With that amazing finger work you must be rather popular at parties."
"Not at any respectable parties, I'm afraid. Don't meet many folk who'd welcome a dhampir smuggler to their homes." The dhampir replies.
She tilts her head at the light-blue orb in the centre of the room before trying to jimmy it out of its pedestal.
It takes a couple of tries, but she does manage to get the orb loose.
"pft! Respectable parties are boring, but if you are ever interested in crashing a gala or two, we can go together and make sweet social ppl mayham." Lora grins wickedly before offing to"let me help with that..."
Only to realize a moment later she didn't need any help.
"Pft! Respectable parties are boring, but if you are ever interested in crashing a gala or two, we can go together and make sweet social people mayhem."
"It DOES sound like a tempting offer when you put it that way." The dhampir remarks as she holds the frost orb in her hands.
"It'd also make Pa's shrivelled black heart explode, as if I'd pass up another reason to torque him right off." She grins wickedly, matching Lora's.
Lora pulls back but doesn't move far. Crystal's response makes her laugh delightfully. "Anything I can do to torque off a father..." she lets the last part settle into silence, marvelling again at the smuggler's work "It's a date then." she says when it's over
Eva can't help to agree on the usefulness of finger work. "In my opinion, finger work is specially useful in respectable parties, because it is really hard to other kinds of works and jobs while being discreet and respectable."
Crystal hands off the frost orb to whoever shows interest and moves to investigate the workroom next.
Lora nods to Eva's thoughts, acknowledging the inventor making Lora's dirty vagary more respectable, and then holds out her hands for the lovely orb since it is both devilishly intriguing and quite cool on a hot day. Plus it's pretty. "My thanks, dear Crystal Crownsilver, I shall treasure it always, or until we sell it for gold."
Crystal opens the door to the workroom. This small workspace features a table with benches on the east side of the room. Along the north wall, a desk covered in various bottles, beakers, flasks, and alchemical tools faces a boarded-up window. The west side of the room contains several iron-banded wooden barrels. A large wasps’ nest near the northwestern corner’s ceiling hums violently.
"Bugs... are not my thing." Lora whispers with her eyes on the wasp nest, from outside the doorway.
Crystal tries to slink into the workroom...
Unfortunately, Crystal is less stealthy than she had hoped. The wasps angrily buzz out of the hive, swarming and stinging at the dhampir!
Swearing like a... well Royken, Lora fires at the tiny wasps to help at rapidly swelling Crystal. "Retreat!" she calls, very heroically.
Crystal runs pell-mell out of the room, swinging wildly at wasps.
Eva holds moves ahead towards the wasps, knowing she'll regret this, and flexes her hand, ready to release yet another electricity blast.
Royken fires his scattergun, scoring a hit, the spread causing several wasps to fall. Eva moves into their midst and unleashes a burst of lightning that wipes out a large swath of the insects! The survivors sting at the inventor.
Lora looks in worry as Eva charges in and starts to get stung as well, "Retreat doesn't mean Charge in another language, does it?" she looks over at Crystal for confirmation but notices how close to collapse. "Keep up the good work, Eva, and you..." she focuses her magic on the gun smuggler, reducing at least some of the painful swelling.
Eva feels the pain of the many stings, releasing another blast of electricity before moving away from the wasps. "Bad idea..."
The wasps are too slow to avoid Eva's second blast, and the remaining insects fall to the ground or pop from the electric blast!
With the threat neutralized, you can earch the room. Taken together, the equipment on the desk is an expanded alchemist’s lab. On the table, turned face down, is a small charcoal drawing of Gattlebee and the dwarf Amery in a wooden frame. You also find a pouch of 42 sp hidden beneath the false bottom of one of the drawers.
Crystal stumbles to the side and sits down, feeling badly screwed up by the wasp stings.
Lora kneels down next to Crystal, her brown eyes full of worry "F$$@ all, my magic isn't supposed to make it Worse! You are ballooning up worse than... umm... something balloony? Stay awake!" Lora grasps the other woman's shoulders and shakes her, which is the extent of her doctoring skills.
Gattlebee pulls out some necromantic oil from his pack and rubs it over Crystal’s injuries. ”Don’t die from wasp stings. That’d be embarrassing.”
With the dhampir saved from death, the alchemist sets to work with some surgical tools to further fix her up.
Crystal gasps for breath as Gattlebee dumps some oil on her and begins to fix her injuries. Her breathing is quite laboured.
"...oh goodness me..."
Lora had moved away to let the good... inventor... do his thing. "Yes, goodness you, I never knew a person's skin could stretch that much with swelling. You need to avoid wasps in the future, a bad allergy, the worst kind, where something so small and harmless to most, can kill you like THAT." she snaps her finger. Loud. "I am glad you did not die, Miss Crownsilver. We do have a date planned, and your death would through my social calendar into a tizzy."
Giving the recovering smuggler a friendly pat, she then goes to their own inventor and helps patch her up "So the lightning is just inside you and you let it out here and there? Isn't that highly dangerous? UseFul, of course, I don't want to make you think I'm complaining." her eyes graze over all the crispy wasp corpses. Then they return to Eva's "You did really well. Thank you." she smiles.
Lora's main worry, etched into her lovely cheeks, is that very thing that exploded into electric devastation, baking wasp after wasp and apparently hurting the very person it is connected to due to its instability was... well proper young ladies don't talk about such things, but this is Lora Drowne, who hasn't really been proper this half of the decade (unless she was faking it), so... the bursting sparking storm thing was INSIDE her, vibrating to an utterly delightful... um... peak?... yes, peak. Maybe three. No, DEFINITELY three.
So there is a concern.
Yes, she didn't die, exploding in an unstable current akin to a lightning bolt from her nethers to her brain, but there might be other opportunities, Nice ones, and she would like to be reassured.
One always likes a little reassurance from time to time.
So she pauses... looking to see if those reassurances might be given, looking into Eva's eyes... hoping that they will be given. (with a pretty please dancing in her brown eyes)
"The electricity is inside my arm..." She says as she removes a plate to reveal a couple copper coils on her arm. "... it fuels it with the power it requires to function. While all sterling dynamos are special, mine is extra special because it works with Stasian coils, instead of regular combustion..." She catches herself from continuing to explaining, realizing that Lora probably doesn't want to know this.
She smiles. "It is quite safe. Even if I'm forcing them to crate those blasts, I have enough safeguards that I'll get just a small zap at the most... it hurts a bit when that happens, but not life threatening unless I'm already on death's doors."
Looking Lora in her eyes, Eva puts her hand on Lora's nape. "We still have so much fun ahead of us, that I do not intend on shocking myself to death any time soon." Her metal hand then rests on the small of her back as she pulls Lora closer to her before giving her a passionate kiss. As the kiss is about to end, she teases her by giving Lora's lips a small bite, while the hand that was on her back sliding down slowly.
Lora does her best to follow. While the complexity of the arm is well beyond her, she does like knowing. The kiss caught her by surprise but the bard did not pull away, she leaned in, accepting and exploring. When it is over she give the inventor a fake reproachful look. "Now young lady do remember that workplace etiquette forbids that kind of... Interaction as it distracts from all the things trying to kill us.". The smile on her lips and shine on her eyes say she does not mind though, not one bit.
As Eva and Lora end their kiss, they see Gattlebee staring at them with a wide grin. "Oh. Don't stop on my account," he says.
You check out the last couple rooms in the brewery. The storage area is stuffed with empty barrels, steel buckets, crates of glass bottles, racks of dusty stemware, and tables covered in taps, siphons, stirrers, and other brewing equipment. A set of sterling artisan’s tools for brewing sits on the counter; they’re intended for brewing beer but would also work for Crafting potions.
From there, you investigate the warehouse. Dusty crates and empty barrels give this wide, open room the familiar look of a warehouse. Several crates marked “grain” and “hops” stand in front of the wide-swinging double door to the north with the busy street beyond. Several small tents are set up around the room, each outfitted with ragged blankets, clothes hung on frayed rope, and an open keg full of rainwater.
Seven people are camped here, a mix of humans and dwarves. They seem to the be in the midst of bickering, though they stop when they notice you. A middle-aged man stands and holds up a hand in greeting. "Hello there. I am Kasali, leader of the Iron Hunters. Be you friend or foe?"
"It also gives us incentive to push forward." Eva says, smiling, but also frowning as she notices the hungry look on their charge's eyes.
"Excellent question" Lora says as she tries to remember...
Still feeling quite shaken from the wasps, Crystal opts to hang back and let Lora handle this.