MIGHT OF THE EMPIRE

Everyone's cover identities were straightforward enough, as was getting into the city. Firefly transitioned seamlessly into an entertainer persona that was almost completely identical to her original occupation, while Beaver took a job as a dockworker for its proximity to freight. Pigeon and Fulcrum posed as new business ownersrunning a lensmakers' shop together. Given that Firefly moved between hotels frequently, and Beaver's dockworkers' accommodations were far from private, the shop served as the group's base of operations.

Most of the necessary equipment was either easy to smuggle in, or able to be purchased within the city. The larger weapons were not. That meant the first order of business was to get the sniper a gun. No one paid any attention to an innocuous piece of flotsam drifting one day down the river that ran through the city, and nobody saw who pulled it ashore the following night. Though the explosives had become too waterlogged to be much use, the rifles were in proper working order. On balance, things had started out on the right foot.

Firefly was quick to turn her charm and natural gregariousness to her advantage. Without delay she was performing at parties of the wealthy elite every night. Her act was an unusual one, so local plutocrats were eager to be in on the next big thing. This gave her an excellent opportunity to observe the attitudes of the ruling class. There seemed to be a great deal of emphasis on how everything was fine, which was a sign clear as day that things were very much not fine. The local nobles and business-owners were perturbed by the prospect of war and were apparently coping by partying it up until something forced them to stop.

Two individuals that stood out from the crowd were a man with a military air and a strongly built woman in the uniform of the city guard. Though most of the other party-goers drifted between groups, these two stuck together and didn't interact with anyone else.

Firefly's performances were exclusively in the evening, so that left most of the day relatively free. After commissioning a tiny collapsible hat for her rabbit Sir Fluffybutt (THE THIRD!), Firefly began cultivating an alternate identity as Jesse, an unassuming young man doing odd jobs around town.

While Firefly was plying her trade, Pigeon and Fulcrum took up a new one. Though they brought assistants with them, it hadn't been practical to bring enough to staff the shop entirely with kingdom agents. Hence they hired a few locals to help keep the business turning over and generally make sure it was all suitably convincing. The business itself performed to a mediocre standard, which was exactly what was needed, and Fulcrum politely declined a sponsorship deal from Firefly.

Once the business was up and running, Pigeon began using the upper storey as a vantage point for spying. The neighbours proved unremarkable. On one side was a carpenter's workshop. On the other was a manufacturer of a more peculiar product - they were makers of novelty prosthetics. The artificial limbs they produced were impractical, but popular among the wealthy as costumes and art objects. Pigeon observed the craftspeople covertly through her spyglass, but turned up nothing of note, and confirmed this with a cursory telepathic sweep.

Though spying on the neighbours proved a bust, spying on the post office proved somewhat more fruitful. Pigeon watched carefully over a period of days, and discovered that certain persons showed up far more often than one would expect. Though one turned out merely to have an epistolist for an aunt, the other turned out to be the wife of a soldier with apparently a lot to say. Observing from a distance, Pigeon watched her return to her home, and filed knowledge of its location away for future reference.

Once she managed to tear herself away from her spyglass, Pigeon also met with her contact, a local mill owner known as Goncharov. Goncharov was well-connected enough to provide the low-down on all the movers and shakers in town, and corroborated Firefly's intuitions about the city zeitgeist - the economy was on a downward trend as other countries were increasingly reluctant to trade with the empire.

Reports of supply chain issues were also borne out by Beaver's experience at the docks which, though far from lifeless, were hardly bustling either. By night Beaver conducted his own reconnaissance, sneaking around the outskirts of the military district and observing what went on there. The military district was importing an egregious number of crates, but not opening any of them. At that distance it was hard to gauge how heavy they were and therefore what might be in them.

Fulcrum's approach to information-gathering was more up close and personal. He started by quizzing the local gunsmiths about business, but they were all circumspect about their government customers. Glancing around one shop, Fulcrum spotted the ledger at the rear of the room and seized on an opportunity. While engaging the shopkeeper in a prolonged, pedantic discussion on the technicalities of firearms, he telekinetically slipped the window open and the ledger through it. Once the ledger was safely extracted, Fulcrum thanked the shopkeeper for his time and extricated himself as well.

After he had retreated to the safety of the lensmakers' shop, Fulcrum read through the ledger in search of leads. He found that one repeat customer was the aide of a local military official, and began to tail this man in search of further clues. The aide turned out to be a supremely dull human being. He spent his days performing errands for his employer, mainly harrying the gunsmiths to see if they were making progress on his order, and after that he went home. Eventually he got wise to being followed, and Fulcrum was forced to duck into a sidestreet to avoid being spotted. It began to look like this juice might not be worth the squeeze.

The climax of the week came with the arrival of the first of the awaited commanders - Cecil Carver. Reportedly, during his time in the trenches Cecil had demonstrated a predilection for performing impromptu battlefield dissections. He had performed them on corpses retrieved from no man's land - after all, it wasn't like anyone else was using them. His appearance only augmented the aura of menace that grew from the seed of his reputation, as he had a full head of height over most of his peers and was musclebound to the point of deformity.

Cecil had brought with him the Penitent Legion, a gaggle of masochists, criminals and vagabonds that met only the barest definition of a military unit. These ruffians immediately swarmed over the military district and cracked open the crates Beaver had spotted earlier. The crates contained tents, with which the Penitent Legion set up camp wherever they could find space.

That night a party was being held in the upmarket end of town, just like every other night, but Cecil's presence cast a pall over the atmosphere. Firefly's performance received muted applause - the crowd was desperate to turn its attention to anything else, yet only Cecil could hold it. Even Sir Fluffybutt's new hat was met with a middling response. Meanwhile Cecil, having ruined everyone else's good time, wasn't having one himself either. For Firefly, this state of affairs simply could not stand, so after her act was over she moved in to engage directly.

Cecil was lingering like a bad smell next to the cop and the local commander who had been hanging around at the previous gatherings, and they were all too glad to talk to someone else. They introduced themselves as Martin Symmonds and Miranda Wright, cheered in all the right places for Firefly's close-up magic performance, and gave veiled insinuations as to the effect of Cecil's army on citywide morale. Cecil himself was taciturn. When he spoke it was with the peculiar drawl of one unpractised at speaking. None of them relinquished any information of note, but Firefly did get the prospect of an invitation into the military district to perform for the soldiers.

Coming up with a plan of attack for the group was now a matter of urgency. The idea of ‘shank Cecil in a dark alley and be done with it' was floated and rejected, at least for now. It still wasn't clear why the empire was gearing up for war, and killing Cecil was unlikely to solve that. Instead, the group plotted ways to get Pigeon into the military district so that she could put her telepathy and familiar to good use.