MIGHT OF THE EMPIRE

In the absence of anything better to do, each member of the team was still pursuing their own leads. Between them they could cover a lot of disparate ground, and if they were lucky the various threads would weave together later.

Beaver had taken it upon himself to investigate the city's jails, suspecting at least one of them to be host to black sites or something equally insidious. The jails were easy to find, and his initial investigations indicated that the guards were competent and alert without being paranoid. He set himself up in a suitably obscured vantage point, and began to watch. One of the guards scanned the streets from his post, and as his gaze passed over Beaver's movements, there was a slight hitch in his movements. At this stage of the game Beaver had little to lose, so he gracefully withdrew from his position and faded back into the cityscape.

Several hours later, Beaver returned under cover of darkness. This time, the guards were more attentive than ever, but none spotted him. There was less traffic in and out of the prison now, and no prisoners were being brought in. It was reasonable to assume that the processing of criminals halted at night. However, one horse-drawn van did arrive, and appeared to be taking prisoners out. Beaver tried to tail it, but it trundled out of sight before he could get to the ground from his high vantage spot. To pique his curiosity further, its path was taking it towards the centre of town. This mystery would have to remain unsolved for the moment, as other matters took precedence.

The aide Fulcrum had tailed might have had all the charisma of a concrete breeze-block, but he also had connections. In the guise of her alter ego Jesse, Firefly asked him for a job. The ensuing conversation confirmed that the aide was low on the Imperial totem pole of command. It barely made sense for an underling like him to have underlings of his own. Nonetheless, Firefly knew just how to stroke his ego and gave the impression of being a like-minded soul. She got a job as his assistant almost immediately.

Firefly's job turned out to be almost as dull as her new employer. It consisted of trailing him around as he harangued all the gun manufacturers in town and humouring him in dull conversation. It turned out that this man did in fact have one (1) hobby - collecting cacti - and in spite of deep devotion to his role knew almost nothing about the Empire's plan. The one interesting piece of information Firefly managed to finagle out of him was that there was a looming two-week deadline to all the gun orders. This didn't explain why the aide was being sent every day two weeks in advance, but that possibly had more to do with his workplace demeanour than anything else.

Meanwhile, Pigeon conducted some aerial reconnaissance over the military district with her lowercase pigeon familiar Perceval. The demarcation between the Penitent Legion and the local military was clear. Most of the Legion's camp was outside the city walls and cordoned off from the main military district. While Cecil's men had been given free rein in the civilian parts of town, the city's permanent military presence was refusing to let them get in the way of business as usual.

As well as revealing the physical layout of the Legion camp, this also gave clues to the social layout. The Penitent Legion lacked any formal command structure. Instead it comprised informal cliques that coagulated around charismatic individuals. The practical upshot of this was that aside from Cecil himself, no one was really in charge of anyone else. This discovery became the germ of an idea. If Cecil was suddenly and violently removed from the equation, his army would likely transform from a source of expendable goons to an active liability. It would also provide an ideal scapegoat - everyone was already predisposed to see the worst in all of them anyway, so if it looked like Cecil got offed by one of his own minions there was little incentive to press the matter further.

Following his previous adventure, Beaver was now spending his nights watching traffic. Though he didn't find out anything further about the van or its occupants, a different opportunity came knocking and Beaver was ready to answer. Two Penitent Legion soldiers, one noticeably drunker than the other, came ambling down the street near where Beaver was people-watching. Thinking quickly, he estimated their likely immediate path and moved to cut them off.

The sober legionnaire never saw Beaver before he dropped on the pair of them from a ledge. The drunk one could only watch on in a stupor as his compatriot crumpled to the ground. He looked around frantically for a foe that had faded into the shadows in an instant before he too was knocked senseless by a dagger hilt to the skull. Step one of the plan had been a success. Beaver then dragged the lifeless form of the sober legionnaire into a sidestreet and stripped him of his distinctive Penitent Legion uniform. A new infiltration tool had been acquired.

The uniform would almost certainly come in handy, but in the meantime Firefly had her own way of getting into the military district. Martin had followed through on his offer for a gig entertaining the soldiers, and Firefly was thus able to gain entry with minimal skulduggery. The debut of Fluffybutt's hat might have been a flop, but the second showing was far better received by the local soldiers. The Penitent Legion proved a tougher crowd, but that had more to do with Firefly fumbling a playing card into their stew than Sir Fluffybutt's couture. Of course, nobody associated any of this with the mild-mannered Jesse calling in sick to his new job.

Pigeon was still putting her own line of inquiry spying on the post office. She set Perceval tailing the woman who had been visiting every day, and turned up more grist for suspicion's mill almost immediately. This woman never left her home except to go to the post office. Furthermore, there were two men frequenting the house. One stayed only briefly, and in all likelihood was probably delivering groceries. However the other remained for hours at a time. Clearly something was up.

Perceval was hence redeployed to tail his previous target's questionable friend. The man traipsed across town and made his way to one of the gunsmithing workshops working on an order for the government. It was clear that a follow-up investigation by human beings was necessary.

Beaver and Fulcrum waited for night to fall, then slunk through the city to the workshop. Beaver picked the lock easily, and they stepped inside. It hadn't been clear from the area accessible to customers, but the rear of the workshop where the gunsmithing took place was quite large and presumably employed several people. It was entirely possible that the man Perceval had followed here was an employee.

As part of its inventory, the workshop contained numerous small barrels of gunpowder, all nearly stacked up against a wall. Beaver's opportunistic side once again made itself known, but he swiftly encountered the natural enemy of all group projects - disagreements over trivialities.

The barrels were stacked multiple layers deep, and Beaver wanted to remove a few from the front layer and pull one out from behind. The theft would be concealed after the barrels from the front layer were returned to their original position. Fulcrum rejected this plan on the reasoning that though the missing barrel would be hidden at first, it would be conspicuous by its absence when the front layer of barrels were eventually removed. It was unlikely that anyone memorised the exact locations of all the stock in the workshop, so a barrel taken from the top might never be missed.

After debating the relative merits of the two options, they finally agreed to re-examine the ledger. This confirmed that the owner did not track inventory, so in the interest of expediency Fulcrum's plan was used. The two of them then slipped out with their prize as discreetly as they had entered.

The following morning, Jesse made a sudden and miraculous recovery, and resumed his job trailing around the aide making him look more important. Those working at the gun shop Beaver and Fulcrum had raided the previous night seemed slightly antsier, but there was nothing tangible for the team to be concerned about.

The arrival of the second general was now looming, so what to do about Cecil had become a matter of urgency. The group has already decided that they should time whatever plan they implemented to immediately precede the arrival of the next general for maximum confusion. The working draft of the plan was to ambush him at the latrines at the edge of the Penitent Legion camp, knock him out, drag him a fair distance away to the edge of the river, and then shoot him with a stolen Penitent Legion gun. After nearly two weeks of investigating and plotting, the time for action had finally arrived.