Completed On the Books (Amolina)

[Inoadar]

OOC - continued from here.

3rd of Spring, 513, near sixteenth bell

"Marcus, I need you to empty this box. Put the jars on the shelf, but leave two of them on the table for later. And I need to you boil the vine pressings down to the third mark on the second stage pressure pot." Inoadar called from the back of his shop, Ino Vations. He shook his head as his assistant suddenly seemed to remember that he worked here.

Inoadar didn't know exactly what was up, but Marcus had been flighty all day. He had gone to the Temple the day before according to one of the ravosalamen. He didn't know why that should be provoking such distraction in the man, but at least he buckled down and worked, when prompted.

'Perhaps Rhysol has betrayed him some way. Thrown his prayers back in his face. Wouldn't that be poetic justice.' the thought brought a snide smile to his face. 'He is the GOD of betrayal after all.'

Work had picked up lately. It had annoyed him that Marcus just HAD to go to the Temple and left early. He had wanted to get the second reagent for the 'False Fire' he wanted to put on his ledger book. He still suspected Marcus of having tried to read through the thing, or copy parts of it, if not steal it outright.

He had taken it home to his room at Tarsin's Boarding House for safe keeping. But not having it at the shop forced him to copy down every detail of transactions on scraps of paper and bring them home to copy them into his ledger. It was a genuine pain in the ass. He decided instead to "spike" his book with a part of the chemical combination for 'False Fire'. The placement of the second chemical, the catalyst, he had not decided on yet. probably the doorknob.

So someone touching the doorknob alone, will be unaffected. Someone touching the book alone, likewise. But touching both, without washing their hands in between would result in glowing hands, a nice sign to betray their actions. Inoadar had been looking forward to initiating his strategy. But Marcus had delayed him. And now, there he was, looking out the window again. Inoadar shook his head.

[Amolina]

~ Amolina Moletta ~ There it was - this must be it - the little shop of poisons. InoVations. The place where the ambitious but so far unknown actress Amolina Moletta hoped to acquire ... a ledger ! Amolina had been sent to the Temple of the Black Sun the previous day and she been given a profitable job, but also been left with double edged memories and emotions. There had been the usual silence of the god, the silence and the – there her trail of thoughts stopped, as there are thought better to not even think and questions better to not ask. She had been watching the mural when she was in the temple. The mural, yes, the mural, oh the mural of Rhysol. Safety, protection and eternal love! This was what the mural showed, where they stood looking upon the face of the god. In all their days he would hold his hand over them. In his loving care no evil would befall them, no sorrow and no pain. Yet … fear had shot through her mind and scattered all her thoughts. But she suppressed the memory and focused on the present. She was here to find and acquire a ledger that someone unknown wanted for reasons equally unknown to her. Amolina abstained from speculations. It wasn’t her business who wanted the ledger, or for what end. Her mission was only to get it, deliver it to the altar in front of the black shard, then collect her golden mizas in The Spot. Make it look like a robbery. Take more things, not the ledger only. And make sure there can be no suspicions towards any employee in the shop. And here she was now, watching the shop and preparing to approach it's door. Poison ! That was a troublesome fact. But there was of course no way back. Albeit she didn’t allow herself to think it, the fact that the ledger was to be delivered to the altar in the temple of the Black Sun spoke volumes. Deep inside she knew: This was the kind of mission no sane citizen of Ravok would even dare to think of rejecting and failure wasn’t an option. She HAD to make it, at all cost.

[Inoadar]

Inoadar straightened up the customer area and stashed his ledger book. He was not going to bother taking it home anymore. He had informed Marcus that he was closing up a bell early tonight. He wanted to be sure to get to Black Tar's Alchemical shop before they closed to pick up that other reagent. Once he got the book rigged, if someone messed with it, they'd be marked.

In this town, with his connections, he'd be able to track them down, he was sure. Perhaps, after procuring the reagent, he'd stop one of the ravosalamen he "knew" and mention a new rumor involving a thief with glowing hands, just for future security. A sneer graced his face with malice.

Marcus had apparently found some focus down the stretch. He had stopped his glancing at the window and seemed to have no problem with closing at sixteenth bell rather than the usual seventeenth. 'Must have a date.' Inoadar mused, with mockery at first, but he shook that off with a tinge of guilt. 'No...good for him. Pick em up, and lay 'em down. Atta boy.'

He watched through the glass as Marcus turned the corner. For a moment, a woman's outline caught his eye. 'Too bad it's not her.' he chuckled to himself. He stepped out, closing the door behind him. He took a padlock and secured the door. He felt good. It had been a profitable day and promised to be a rewarding night. As he headed off in the direction of Black Tar, he was undecided if he'd stop at a tavern, after picking up the chemical, to have a celebratory drink or two, or come back and give the book its treatment first.

'Ahh well. I've got all night to decide that.' he mused dismissively.

[Amolina]

~ Amolina Moletta ~ A black silk mask embroidered with a bronze-coloured pattern concealed the upper part of Amolina’s face. Under the mask was one more mask, painted on her skin. Cosmetics, the best friends of anyone that want to set off her looks – or conceal them. Black lace covered the slits in the silk mask where the light crystal blue of her eyes could be vaguely discerned, and beneath the mask her mouth could be seen, meticulously painted in a mix of rose and golden hues. Her dark violet dress was made of silk, but the quality was not the best. The cut of the dress was classical and elegant, yet somewhat anonymous. It was perfect for an actress that wanted to make people see what they wanted to see, and disregard the rest. She wore a dark cloak over it, but the hood wasn’t pulled up to conceal her head, no way, not with all the effort she had put into that hairstyle. She had spent hours making it look completely casual and carefree. Artificial simplicity can take forever to accomplish. The poison shop was a simple brick building with an unadorned dark wood door. A plain white sign with black lettering "Ino Vations" could be seen over the picture window. While Amolina started to slowly draw nearer, the door suddenly opened. The unimportant looking and seemingly very religious man that Amolina had spoken with in the temple the previous day came out. Perhaps he had seen her, or perhaps not : he gave no visible sign of being aware she was there. At a quite speedy pace he turned around a corner and went out of sight. Whe she spotted him, it had made Amolina stop and hesitate and while she hesitated, another man came out, closed and locked the shop’s door and started walking. He wasn’t strolling idly, but walked with the resolute gait of a man with a clear goal and a deadline to keep. He was a darkhaired man of average height, and not of bulky build. She wasn’t near enough to see his face but she guessed it must be the owner of the shop, the man that called himself Nolan Parnell. She had planned to start by visiting the shop to investigate it and try to find out more about the place and eventually find out where that mysterious ledger was. But now they seemed to have closed for the day. Bad luck! Then again, now she had a great opportunity to try to get in and search the shop at once. If she had been good at picking locks, that was. As it was, her best bet now seemed to be to discreetly follow the shop owner wherever he was heading. She might find useful information and at some point she might even get an opportunity to try to steal the key to the shop from him. She hurried up and went after him, at a safe distance, but taking care to not lose sight of the man.

[Inoadar]

Inoadar strode confidently for several blocks before stopping to examine some leather ware on display at a clothier. His memory took a bit of jogging, but it came back to him that he had seen a number of these styles at the cut-rate kiosks that often crowded the docks. People selling their old, used items out of crates at 'coppers-for-silver' rates. He had seen some very nice things go very cheap. If they had been his size, he would have snapped them up.

He wondered if they were knock-offs of the items in the window before him now, or if they were stolen. For no more reason than simple curiosity, he took a moment to study the door. Yes, there it was. The door sported a locking handle, one unit. To the side, on the wall there was a flaw, a filled hole where the u-bolt had been embedded to accompany a padlock. It looked as though someone had noted a weakness in the mortar and pried it out. Now the padlock system had been replaced with the locking handle.

Inoadar chuckled. It served the fool right. You should always maintain security, both your own level of awareness and the quality of your hardware and fittings. This owner had overlooked the soundness of the wall itself. Or rather, the lack thereof. The finest padlock in the world is worthless if it locks a rotting door. Inoadar had heard similar sayings applied to just about every aspect of life. He was always checking such things. He knew his padlock, door and wall were all sound as the miza.

His other approach had worked quite well also. He'd allowed a local kid to be "encouraged" to shoplift an item, a vial of some contact poison that hadn't been moving well at the time. He had reasoned he could afford the loss of a vial in exchange for an object public lesson in the dangers of shoplifting poison. The punk had grabbed and dashed...and died a few blocks away. Inoadar had expressed his public regret that the vial had leaked, but after all, there were warnings in the shop about "having an employee handle the products on display."

The memory brought a warm chuckle to his belly, and hunger brought a growl. After he visited Black Tar, he would get something to eat. He turned away from the window and crossed the walkway to enter a crossing the ran off to the left. A few more blocks and he would turn right and right again, into the Alchemist's Shop.

[Amolina]

~ Amolina Moletta ~ While Amolina discreetly followed the man she supposed was the poison maker Nolan Parnell – albeit she had been told it was a false name – she took in the well known surroundings of The Docks. This was her home, where she had lived all her life and where she nowadays had her own small cubicle in the big NHC buildings. It was the time of the afternoon when shops are still open, but some of them are starting to close as the evening draws nearer. Commerce was still intense, sellers as eager to advertise and sell their wares as the customers were to buy and consume them. The first evening guests had started to arrive to the inns, and various other entertainment establishments were on their way to wake up for the night to come. The constant low sound of the water moving in the canals mixed with the nearly soundless rustling of the silk in her dress when she walked after Parnell with careful stealth, trying to stay at as long distance as possible in order to not be noticed by him. She walked beside different random people in the crowd, silently acting like she was in the company of others. She laughed with a group of laughing women on their way home from work, pretending she was one of them, behaving the same way, mimicking their strolling and relaxed way of walking, silently making it look like she too was bantering and free after work. The group of working class women took another way and Amolina switched into walking beside two scolars in dark clothes, briefly acting a scolar like them, until she moved close to a somewhat chaotic group of mothers with children, taking on their way of looking around anxiously for their small ones. This way she mingled with the people around her and used them as a way of melting into the background of the city. She was a professional actress and it wasn’t hard for her to get the important things to impersonate and act out. The only problem was the silk mask - it was meant to conceal her, but now when she instead needed to fit in among various groups of people it made her stand out instead, in every random group of bypassers she walked beside. Troublesome, but removing it was no improvement, as the make up under it was as spectacular as the mask itself. Eventually Nolan Parnell went into Black Tar alchemist shop. Amolina didn’t want to draw attention to herself for nothing, so she found it best to just wait for him to come out again. She stopped by a small Rhysol shrine in a niche of the wall of a house nearby. A convenient reason for any piteous good citizen of Ravok to just stand there for a while …

[Inoadar]

Inoadar was not surprised that he was made to pay the full price for the separated chemical for the False Fire liquid. As the clerk at Black Tar said, it required the complete chemical to begin with, and they had no real use for the other half of the product. The only thing that annoyed him was his own oversight to this logic when he first purchased the initial chemical.

'Live and learn. You never stop.' he thought to himself as he handed over his ten gold mizas. Such a minor thing was not going to upset him tonight though. He took the two bottles in hand as he walked out the door. As he hit the open walkway, he transferred his keys to the left pocket of his cloak, not wanting any chance of the paired flasks getting cracked by other items in the right pocket with them.

'Well, that's that.' he thought as he stopped to consider his next destination. Their was a woman across the way praying to Rhysol. Even though he had been feeling an odd sense lately that this town was not like Nyka, where he had lost faith in gods and their worshipers, he still valued his independence. It made him slightly self-conscious to watch someone praying to the local god and he turned away without really marking anything about her appearance.

It also wore on him strangely that he found he liked this town. It wasn't that he wanted to be its enemy, but if he had to choose a town where he would build a network for his own benefit, he would have preferred it be a town that didn't appeal to him. It had begun to feel like he was betraying a friend. He shook this off. Why should he feel this way? He contributed a valid resource. He spent his mizas here. He was a solid part of the economy and community, if not an actual citizen. And even THAT was convincingly forged.

Again, he dismissed this train of thought, determined to let nothing cloud his sense of triumph. He would celebrate with a dinner and drink, and then he would return to the shop and treat his ledger. He walked a few more blocks and found a quiet diner with an outdoor courtyard dotted with tables. He sat and ordered a drink first as he considered the level of his appetite.

[Amolina]

~ Amolina Moletta ~ When Nolan Parnell came out from the alchemist shop, Amolina had pretended to pray, looking down on the ground and turned halfways away like she wasn’t watching at all. But she had secretly been looking at the poison maker all the time and observed how he put things in the pockets of his cloak. And cloak pockets were where most people put their keys. She had decided to steal the keys. The guests were pretty few, and it was quiet and calm in the diner where Amolina had followed Parnell. It was early spring and the weather was lovely, like it always was in Ravok. The outdoors part of the tavern bathed in the dark golden afternoon light, that special warm and golden light that heralds the coming sundown before it can be discerned on the sky. Amolina had been here before, more than once during the years, and she knew that when dusk came and darkness fell the waiters would light lanters of many colors and the small lights would embellish the quite simple place and make everything look beautiful and enthralling. Normally she would have loved to sit at a table in this garden with a glass of vine and wait for the evening to come and enclose her in darkness sprinkled with light. Oh, well. She was here to steal keys ... Illusions, but people wanted illusions, they wanted them badly. Amolina watched her prey thoughtfully. Nolan Parnell sat at one of the tables outdoors. He was darkhaired, lean and wiry. It was hard to judge his age, but he didn’t look to be an old man. Upper twenties something, perhaps. Apart from that and his profession she knew nothing about the man and how he was, absolutely nothing … this was a bad thing as she had no idea what would be the best way to proceed … One way would be to pretend to stumble over him, smear a small dot of jam or chutney on him, start to wipe it off of him while apologizing hysterically, babble,be fussy, divert him while she quickly got her hand into his pockets and snatched the keys, if they were there. The other option would be to join him at the table for a while and try to entertain and divert him with stories and so on, get him a bit drunk and very discreetly pick the keys. In case he was the kind of person that knew the “stumble trick”, and was likely to catch her red handed if she tried it, the latter option might be better. For a start Amolina stopped the waitress he had spoken with and tipped the woman for making Parnells drink a bit stronger than he knew.

[Inoadar]

Inoadar sipped the drink, absentmindedly swirling it to add the gentle clink of the ice to the ambiance of the sidewalk diner's atmosphere. He felt good. Better than he had in some time. He took another sip and felt better still...

'Whoa' he thought, 'I better get something in my stomach soon.' He waved down a waitress and asked to see a menu. It was not an extensive menu, though it had improved in the last several weeks. Not long ago, it had been almost nothing but fish. Inoadar's knowledge of aquatic poisons made him less than enthused about seafood. He finished his drink as he scanned the few selections.

He was glad to see "Hearty Venison Stew" and slid a gold to the waitress to ensure a generous helping and the freshest bread. By the gods, things were looking up and he deserved to indulge! He ordered another drink. His network was extending ever further. Ino Vations was making good money. He was further ahead on his payments than he'd expected. RED meat was making its way back onto menus. The light gravy and roasted vegetables were hitting the spot as well. Another nice cold drink just to settle dinner. A little more bread to sop up he gravy. He finished his third drink and leaned back in his chair.

He was a little dizzy and sat back up straight, suddenly thinking to assess his condition. He started to laugh. What? Had he thought for a moment that he'd been poisoned...HE was the poisoner! Nonetheless, he stood up to see how his balance checked out. Okay he was drunk, but nothing more than that. He moved around some to check for the sort of effects he would attribute to afflicted muscles and such. The only affliction he noticed was that he was getting sweaty.

That called for another drink! He took his cloak off and felt the breeze. Oh yeah, life was good!

[Amolina]

~ Amolina Moletta ~ Amolina had dismissed the stumble trick and settled for a more subtle approach. When Parnell first laughed abruptly, then got to his feet and moved a bit she could see the tiny sings of drunkenness. His movements were just a wee bit overly controlled that telltale way. It was time to strike. Strike? Really? Where had that notion come from ? Why had the word even occurred to her ? She didn’t know. But time to strike it was. She had counted his drinks, all of them spiked, not so much that it was obvious, just … stronger than he realized. It’s not the strong, obviously intoxicating spirits that makes people the most drunk. It’s the seemingly harmless and soft ones that goes to their heads before they know what’s happening to them. He took of his cloak. Good. Now she just needed to make him forget his cloak and not notice what would happen to it. Amolina walked over to his table, the cheap cloth of her silk dress rustling silently when she moved. She had kept the mask on. It was after all a quite nice combination of a disguise to hide in and a way to stand out look intriguing. She stopped beside Nolan Parnells table and remarked on what a warm evening it was, albeit the evening weather was actually just like it always was all evenings this time of the year. “It really is warm” she said to Parnell, in the kind of pleasant, easygoing and somewhat impersonal voice people use when they speak with random strangers about weather and wind. “I think I’ll take my cloak off too … “ Her cloak came off and she stood there with it folded over her black gloved arm and looked around searchingly in the still pretty calm outdoor part of the tavern. “Few people here today” she remarked, making her voice sound disappointed now. “Do you mind if I sit down at your table for a while? Or do you want to be alone ?” She smiled tentatively, already moving slightly away from the table at the point she ended the sentence, like she had already regretted she had asked the question and would leave again any second. She smiled faintly again, an awkward, embarrased and apologetic smile, produced by a professional actress. “I’m sorry. Where's my manners. I really shouldn’t be disturbing you like this …” The breeze moved in her dark hair and in the skirt of the dress. Through the black lace over the slits in the mask her light crystal blue gaze could be seen.