(This is only the second draft of the book Worthless. Expect typos, plot holes, odd subplots and the occassionally wrongly named character, especially minor characters. It is made public only to give people a rough idea of how the final story will look)

Chapter 18

"So, spirits, huh?"
Daniel leaned back in his chair. It was one of those chairs designed for gamers, or for a certain breed of avid computer users. The back of it rose above the guy's head, but that had as much to do with the size of the chair as with the height of Daniel himself.
"I hate spirits, Marie. They make things complicated."
He had a very good point. Any mission that dealt with spirits was a risk, or even more a risk than anything else. Spirits were fickle and hard to get to talk. Happy Marla was a rarity in her time, someone still capable of connecting with the spirits that remained around her world. It was entirely by accident that anyone had even realized that spirits existed in her time. They messed with sensitive electronics, and someone had spotted the pattern and put together the right equipment to filter the spirits from the noise. And even that was so delicate and flawed that it required a semi-isolated spot like Happy Marla's to make it work. Or Teresa's. That encounter had been confusing on a completely different level.
"I don't entirely disagre, Danny, but it's not like I wanted things to go this way. I just..."
The spirits had reacted very strangely. It remained a puzzle.
"Daniel, is there anything we know that could explain why spirits would freak out about a TT project?"
"I have no idea," Daniel answered. "Time travel projects are still weird to us, all of us. I doubt anyone outside 28714 could really answer that question."
"Well, all of this used to be theirs, didn't it? You never found anything in their archives on spirits?"
Daniel laughed, swiveling slightly in the tall chair. His eyes ran across the many monitors he had running in the room, even though none of them had anything on them to do with the topic at hand.
"Marie, you gotta understand," he chuckled, in a slightly nervous sounding way, "28714 is still a complete mystery, and half the stuff here is just, like, background. I don't know what to do with it. Combine that with another mystery like spirits, and it just gets exponential."
He turned to look, clearly not satisfied with the expression that met him.
"Okay, look, all I can do is guess. Do you want me to guess?"
It was hard to tell if he meant it, or if it was rhetorical. Whatever the case, a silent nod was all that was needed to get him going, although he seemed very uncomfortable with the idea.
"Okay, so, spirits are Fifth Force, right?" He needlessly waited for a nod, knowing full well the answer, but then continued. "So, Fifth Force stuff is, well, the Fifth Force is really weak. The four fundamental forces beat it by, like, leaps and bounds. Strong Interaction and Weak Interaction hold atoms together like nobody's business, Gravity keeps planets around stars and our feet on the ground, and Electromagnetism basically makes every technology work. But Fifth Force stuff is so fickle that we barely even sense it on a day to day basis. That's why we don't use it around here, right?" Again, he waited for a nod he really didn't need. "But we always get some Fifth Force crap when we do alterations to the time machines. We've still got a #*@!ing village worth of refugees trying to mop up Fifth Force static from last time we upgraded A5."
"What's your point?"
He suddenly looked a bit bitter. "I'm speculating, okay? Thinking out loud." As if to signal his irritation at being interrupted, he swiveled around to look at the screens instead. He didn't stop speculating out loud, though.
"If Fifth Force stuff is fickle, and time machines mess with it, I'm guessing your little doomsday device is going to be really annoying to anything that depends on Fifth Force. Like spirits."
It made sense. Underneath his longwinded monologue, there was a certain kind of simple logic to it.
"So, in short, you think that if this thing blows and ejects all time travelers from the timestream, it's going to rip the spirits a new one along with it? Seems... excessive."
Daniel laughed. "And you think 28714 blowing every time traveler back to their origin point isn't a bit on the excessive side? We're not dealing with brain surgeons, here. They fix unwanted changes to history by killing people and replacing them with robot copies, for #*@!'s sake!"
Again, he was making an uncomfortable amount of sense.
"If the spirits get whammed by this crap, we should try to get them on our side, somehow."
The frustrated smile on Daniel's lips evaporated almost immediately, leaving him glaring in his own, almost-but-not-really-angry way.
"You want to what, recruit spirits? Across time? Like, in every place that the white woman's project has even one of those giant machines?"
He was, again, right. It was a bad idea.
"Look, Marie, you still have her list of jump points. We know every time and place she has visited back when 28714 still ran this place. All I'm doing is guessing, so maybe you should run those leads and see what else falls out. Maybe there's some wise dude with a long white beard sitting on some hilltop in the early Roman Empire, who knows exactly what's going on."
He turned his head, clicking a mouse in his mess of a computer system, almost as if to show that he had nothing more to offer. He did turn back after a few seconds, though, but it seemed like more an act of politeness than to offer any more talking points.
"What? Marie, I know that look. You're plotting something."
He was, as always, correct.
"Just thinking... It might not have to be someone with a long beard."
"What, you got some seance going on in Nakskov? The island of Lolland isn't exactly known for being the spiritual center of Europe, or even Denmark as far as I know."
He didn't seem all that hurt by not getting an answer.

"Kris, we got that brick for 1972 Manchester, right?"
Startled, or more precisely scared out of his wits by the sudden presence of someone else in his little domain, Kris jumped to his feet with a long, thin metal thing in his hand, something that apparently belonged in the defunct piece of time travel tech on the floor by his feet.
"For #*@!'s sake, knock before you..."
"Sorry, too much caffeine!"
"You don't dirnk coffee, Marie."
"Coke Light, just emptied a maxi bottle!"
"Why? You can get a heart attack in more pleasant ways, can't you?"
"Just... 1972, Manchester, brick. Please?"
"Alright, alright, already. I'll look. How about you switch do decaf cola in the meantime."
Raising his hands as if to evade a rabid gunman, the old man nearly stumbled over his own tools strewn on the floor as he went to flip through the cabinets full of cartridges along the rear wall of the room.
"What you want with 1972, anyway? That's not on Sidney's travel list, is it?"
"No. Not going there for her, going there for me."
The brief stop from flipping through the cartridges could be heard across the entire room, the little clicks of odd material used for TT tech pausing for just a few seconds. They continued after that, though.
"Marie, are you going off the reservation again? You know there be monsters outside the map, right?"
Like apparently everyone else in the place, Kris, too, was right. It was beginning to be annoying how everybody else seemed to be the voice of reason.
"I need some info, is all. Got a... Got a... Jesus #*@!ing christ, my head feels like it's gonna explode."
"You got two liters of unleaded diabetes fuel in you, I'd be more worried about your bladder."
"Sweet Jesus, you're right. Be right back!"
The door nearly hit someone in the head as it slammed open. The rooms along the corridor were tech personnel only, but there were starting to be a few too many techs running around. The talks about some more aggressive upgrade strategies meant that everybody had something that had to be upgraded, or even replaced. Everybody had been on alert for over a week, and none of them knew why. Apart from Daniel and Kris, only about a handful knew about the woman in white, Sidney, and all the stuff that The Embassy was starting to uncover about her operation. 28714, her apparent employers, were still mostly a label, something that was known to exist but that was about all that was known about them. Most of the new techs were actually time travelers themselves, but they were mainly refugees. They knew little or nothing about the greater picture, only that someone with a lot of power was trying to hunt down them and their families. The Embassy was their last refuge, the only stepping stone to a better life that they knew. But that stepping stone had a price, and they were working it off. It had been a debated topic, but in the end, The Embassy had benefitted immensely from letting them work, rather than just having them sit around, waiting for a placement somewhere in time and space.
Down the corridor, near the central bathroom hub, the clutter of people got more dense. The tech area had its own bathrooms, but with all the commotion, bathrooms ended up getting used a lot, and the cleaning crews were, logically so, more focused around the area that had the most bathrooms, which was the hub. The place was used so much that there were now comfortable couches for those waiting in line when that line was at its longest. It was just one of those weird things, a key decision for the daily operation of The Embassy, but not something one would usually think was so important. But then again, people never took something like efficient sanitation serious. Not until it broke down. Then everybody was, well...
"Marie!" a voice called out from the small crowd gathered near one of the vending machines that had been installed recently, too. A young boy, maybe seven or eight, let go of a grown man, likely a parent. His face looked familiar.
"Hi, Marie! Where have you been?"
"Oh, you know, around. I've been pretty busy. How are you doing?"
"Great!" he said, his face nearly splitting from the smile he had on him. "My dad just got a small place for us in six hundred something. It's supposed to be real nice there!"
The kid was practically beaming of pride in his dad. It seemed like a jerk move to push him away, rush or no rush.
"That's great, buddy, I'm happy for you!"
"Why do you call us buddy all the time?" he asked, still nothing but smiles.
"Oh, I just, I mean, my... my mo always called me... buddy. Buddy."
He clearly wasn't buying it.
"It's okay, my new name is Greg, anyway," he chirped, showing a piece of paper with a lot of text on it, something that clearly he wasn't meant to read. It had a small symbol at the top, the official insignia of The Embassy, an arrow looping around on itself. Most people thought it looked more like a stylized drawing of a fat penguin, and that had actually become its nickname.
"Well, I'll remember to call you that, Greg."
The boy made a hoyful little jump, the head-splitting smile returning to his lips.
"Wait, Greg, does your dad know a refugee named Polanita? A tall woman with..."
"Poliantas," the boy interrupted. "Yeah, they were in the same arrival bitch."
His last remark was a bit surprising, until the mistake became clear.
"Batch. The same arrival batch, Greg."
The boy showed no sign of understanding why he was being corrected, but no sign of really worrying about it, either.
"Could you ask your dad to find her for me, maybe meet me here in fifteen minutes or so? It's really important."
"Is this my mission?" he asked, eyes widening till they threatened to pop out of his head.
"Yeah, sure. You got a mission, Greg. I believe in you."
With no further word, the boy darted off towards the man he had been standing with, apparently his dad. That bought a bit of time to visit the bathroom.
There was no line, but of the around two dozen individual bathrooms, a lot of them were taken. By the sinks, a few people were talking, most of them in languages that sounded very unfamiliar. At this point, the majority of people in The Embassy were refugees, and it was increasingly normal to feel a bit out of place there. But an empty bathroom was still possible to locate, and the rest was just background noise at this point. It took a while, but you got used to having weird and interesting people walking around, even if you didn't always understand what they were saying, or walking around for.
Outside, the kid was waiting. His dad was not there, but the boy seemed to be very positive about something.
"Dad said she'll be here in a second," he said, fiddling with his fingers in a slightly nervous, but mostly excited way. He was still giddy about the new home, probably, and it made sense. Refugees could end up waiting months for a new place to live. It all depended on how well The Embassy's outtime missions were going.
As promissed, his dad came only moments later to pick him up. He seemed like a fairly normal-looking guy, not particularly short or fat, but next to the woman accompanying him, he could have been an obese dwarf. Her willowy figure, easily standing one and a half head above the man, seemed to sway dangerously as she took one long stride after another towards the sitting section in the middle of the hub. She wore standard Embassy clothes, the kind refugees usually got on arrival, since most arrived with their own clothes in tatters from the trip, or even literally on fire! Most got new clothes later, but hers had to be fitted to her unusual stature, and the ones she had on clearly had been. She likely found it easier to keep using them than to go out and get it all done again to more normal clothes.
"Hi, Polanti... Poliana.... Oh god, I'm sorry."
"It's okay," she said, her voice sounding inhumanly soft and melodic. "I go by Paula here. Not a new name, but it seems easier for people."
That was actually pretty common. Refugees came in from all over the timeline, and from most parts of the world. Names were a mess, the number of languages and naming traditions that existed. A few simply ended up being called the names that others could most easily use that resembled the most, but most just picked a name they liked. There were odd choices, like people taking names from things, like Mustang or Carbon, but in the end, it seemed to be a system that worked. That alone meant quite a lot.
"Great, thanks. Paula, I'm Marie." Paula paused awkwardly to look at the hand being stretched out to her. Like the name, this, too, was common. Shaking hands had its own roots in history, something people had simply started doing for various reasons. Most seemed to think that showing open hands as a greeting started when people needed to show that they carried no weapons, and the handshake developed from a friendly version of that over the course of decades or even centuries. In many times and places, it was an utterly bizarre thing to the people living there. Paula, however, ended up shaking the hand, having probably just not yet had the time to get used to the custom. "Sorry to drag you in here, but I need your help."
We sat down, sinking in quite a bit to the surprisingly soft pillows. The couches were not built for people of Paula's body proportions, and it showed, her knees almost reaching the height of her chest as she tried to sit comfortably. She had long, waving, reddish hair, white specks scattered throughout it. Age was catching up with her, but she carried it well, her fine features adding to the idea of a delicate tree.
"I need.... I need some help, Paula. I'm looking for some people, and I think you know some things that could make that easier for me."
Paula's brow crumbled up like folded paper as she squinted skeptically.
"You arrived here from a fallen colony in the 1950s, right? Somewhere around Liverpool?"
She nodded and leaned slightly forward against the long legs, the brow staying as crumbled as ever.
"But you're not from Liverpool, right? You're not even from Europe?"
All of a sudden, her eyes under the crumbled brow became a littel frightful, like a grazing animal sensing that something was wrong, but not knowing exactly what.
"I need to know about the Leaping Serpents. I think you know who they are."

The trip to Manchester had been so gentle it was almost uncanny. The arrival had a little bit of impact, hanging slightly above a grassy meadow, but it was nothing that couldn't be handled by landing in an almost childish squat, like clumsily jumping off a slightly high ledge. It helped that it was only a matter of decades. Even going across the water and landing inside the northern parts of England, the amount of energy was far less than most others jumps. Distance in space was nothing, compared to distance in time. The rule of thumb said that going a kilometer was about as harsh as going back or forth five minutes. The Moon was a lighter trip than a century back or forth.
Of course, as with any trip that wasn't a complete guess, the arrival was in the middle of nowhere. The meadow looked peaceful and friendly in the early morning, a crisp day in what should be early spring, if the calculations were correct. And with the less energy that was needed, clothes were also safer to wear during the jump. A jump across two centuries could make even treated leather start to simmer, but a less than half a century, it was safe to wear something light that would not easily catch fire. And denim was very much a look of the decade. The loose pants, of course, helped ventilate a lot of the heat, even if it made the bottom by the feet flare up like a cartoon fart joke!
The quiet was the one thing that stuck out the most. So many trips across time, so many Embassy contacts waiting at nearby pick-up points. This was not an established Embassy arrival point. It was just a brick in the archive, one of the many cartridges that Kris and a few others were still working hard to catalogue. The Embassy, or the buildings now used for it, had housed a lot of strange things, things that had simply been left behind when it was abandonned, so to speak, by the woman in white and 28714. Granted, it had been a bitch to claim the place, and there were still sections that bordered on all-out war to put into use, with strange creatures seeking shelter in what they suddenly saw as fair game, now that the original inhabitants were gone. The Embassy had mixed success dealing with that. Some creatures could be scared away, some could be bargained with. Some were... difficult. And some had very long claws, fangs, or worse.
The meadow was a stark contast to that. Soft winds swept across it, rustling long blades of grass that had grown quickly. Good soil, not unlike around Nakskov, and across the entire isle of Lolland. But there was a foul scent on the air, carried from somewhere else. Charred, almost putrid, a hint of something far away that was very unlike the peaceful plot of open nature. This was a time just before concerns about pollution began to settle in. Somewhere, industry was sending smoke into the air, smoke filled with things that had little to do with nature.
In spite of the denim shirt, the walk to the nearby road was cool, the winds gathering unhindered in the flat landscape and ganging up to chill the skin of careless wanderers. There was no sign of a car anywhere, even though the road stretched visibly forever in both directions. It was going to be a long walk.
As hills and small bridges passed by, though, there was a calm to it. The Embassy had not always been as active as it was, and it definitely did not always have carefully watched arrival points across time. How long had it even been, now? With time travel, things like actual time became fluid, flexible, hard to pin down with any precision. In Nakskov, it had been a few years. But that could mean anything, in the end.
What the empty road gave more than anything else was, ironically, time. Time to think. Or, perhaps more importantly, time to not think. As a hare took a few leaps across the road, everything seemed to become more distant. The Embassy, the strange machines, the refugees. Out of sight was not entirely out of mind, but distance made it all seem less pressing, less real. When the trip ended, it was back to The Embassy, and to anoyone there, it would seem like no time had passed at all. It was an odd sight to behold, the time machine making a lot of drama before making a booming sound, and anything inside of it changed. In the space between one second and the next, the traveler went from what he or she was before leaving, and to what he or she was after. To the spectator, it looked like the person inside in a flash had new scars and bruises, clothes moving and perhaps tearing, hair cut or even growing. Hours, days or weeks passed in the blink of an eye, and when it....
A car. It was far away, but it was approaching. Suddenly, the weight of the world became real again, the world pulled into focus almost against its will.
Perhaps five minutes went by, just watching the car approach. An old model, even for the time, the classic curved triangular hood between bulging headlights. A family car, from the looks of it, but no family inside.
"Hi there," said the young man inside, thick northern English accent, a dash of countryside growl to it. "What the hell you doing out here, Miss?"
The words came accompanied by a friendly smile, clearly being meant well. He did look over the denim wardrobe, though.
"Lost your band, have you?" he asked, a bit unexpectedly.
"Band?"
"Sorry, ma'am, thought from the getup that you were in a band. Doesn't look much like work clothes."
The denim choice had been not just for practical reasons, but to fit in. It seemed like working clothes at the time, when looking at them in the dressing room at The Embassy. Apparently, they didn't quite fit the bill. Between available materials, local fashions and habits of the time, it was never easy to pick good clothes for a trip that even allowed them. Some still argued for time travel in the nude, avoiding all the issues, but the issues that came from that was a whole different set!
"You're going to Manchester?"
The man nodded. Seeing him sit in the car, offering a ride, caused memories of the guy in the scorpion robot to return. What was his name, Trevor? Tanner?
"How did you end up here?" he asked as the car sped up again. The suspension felt like almost nothing, the entire car rattling enough to half drown out the young man's voice. Then again, he didn't raise his voice to compensate, probably being fully used to the noise. He looked like someone in his early to mid twenties, a bit short and rough on the skin. Farmer, most likely, or some helping farmhand like a mechanic or carpenter. Something rattling in the back of the car sounded like a box of tools, but that did little to narrow it down.
"A trip went a bit wrong."
"That happens," he commented with a suppressed  chuckle. "Boyfriend troubles?"
He sat for a moment, clearly very keen on knowing the answer. When there was no answer at all, he seemed to get a bit nervous.
"Girlfriend troubles...?"
An age of change. It was obvious in his tone that he had no idea how to tackle that possibility. But he didn't seem to want to press the issue.
"Brother troubles, honestly. Dislikes my choice of boyfriend, and very willing to argue about it. As long as I agree with everything he says."
The young man nodded, clearly a bit relieved that he didn't have to navigate the strange new customs that were washing over his time. Every age, from the early stone age to the edge of that future war beyond which The Embassy could not reach, was undergoing changes. Change was, as the saying went, the only thing that was constant.
"Gabe, by the by," he added, now a bit more confidently, and reached across a hand for shaking.
"Marie. Nice meeting you, Gabe."
Beyond nearby hills, the city was starting to come into view. Darkly reddish stone monoliths, the new face of labor housing for the age, seemed to rise on their own accord from the ground as the hill rolled under the wheels of the car.
"Just going in to get some supplies. Setting up my own workshop out there. Always been good at fixing these iron beasts," he said, clapping on the dusty dashboard, "thought I'd make some pennies from my help to others."
There was a charm to his casual enthusiasm and youthful pride in his work. Slamming into times and being ripped out just as dramatically made everything seem to have high stakes, every task strange and new. It was easy to forget the mundanity of real life, of the world that the vast majority of people still inhabited. People like Gabe, and his new pride of doing an honest day's work.
"Good hands are good friends. You have a card?"
Gabe looked a bit baffled.
"A card, perhaps with an address and a phone number on, if I ever needed my car fixed?"
"You have a car?" he asked a bit sheepishly, apparently completely oblivious of the idea of new customers.
"Well, you never know. Maybe me and some friends will settle down here, build something for ourselves."
Maybe the thought wasn't that silly.

Stepping onto the city streets was like walking into one of the many brick walls lining it. The open landscape and rolling hills already seemed like a different world entirely, one condemned to nothing but memory. Minutes after Gabe left, his mind still buzzing with the need for business cards, he, too, seemed like some odd memory of a meeting long ago. Reality was now tall and dark walls of brick.
At The Embassy, Paula had given a very detailed description of the place, but the real thing was a bit more overwhelming. Even though they were in no way worthy of labels like skyscraper, the buildings rose so dominantly above the street, the sheer amount of them wiping away any semblance of a horizon. All that was were more buildings, more bricks. Gabe had even seemed a bit uncomfortable about driving to the shipping district, watching the streets closely as the car entered this apparently hostile place. It seemed rather calm, though, the forboding feeling resting more in the architecture than in any threatening characters running around. But then again, few threatening characters stepped up to introduce themselves just out of the blue.
With morning work already in full swing, though, it wasn't like the streets were empty. The main street still had people trundling mindlessly to some work that, form the looks on their faces, many did out of necessity, not excitement. In the smaller alleyways, the ones Paula had described so vividly, a man or two in workmen's clothes would typically be in a slow rush to get somewhere. An anthill, thousands of worker ants making their way to where they might be needed and rewarded to be. The real world. But this real world was not the destination for this trip. At most, it was the metaphoric scenic element along the side of the road.
And as the destination grew closer, the scenic element felt more absurd. Nobody complained about trespassing, not even through areas that clearly held goods for various markets. Fish, pork, ox, meats of any and every kind were being cooled on blocks of ice, out in the open. A thief could find free meals easy, if everybody placed that much trust in strangers that cut through their place of work! And in the end, it all came down to a single door.
Placed inside a suspiciously empty warehouse, in the middle of a busy district handling stored goods for transport, the door was in the corner. A normal door, red paint peeling along the edges. It was easy to overlook, but that was by design. The small marker near its top right was all that gave it away, and that could have looked like an unintended spatter of paint to anyone not aware what to look for. Like the fat penguin of The Embassy, it was stylized. A worm, a serpent, leaping from the water, dolphin style. Anyone else might see a blurry line above a few wavy squiggles, but that was the nature of hidden markers.
Inside, the smell of sweat and smoke immediately billowed out! It surrounded the doorway, forcing itself into nostrils and eyes, causing both to try to shut and watering up. It was overwhelming, but only for a little bit. Then, like so many other things, it melted into the background.
Along the walls of a narrow corridor, plain paintings were hung, none of them framed. Images of mythical creatures facing human-like shapes, the human shapes often a fraction the size of the creatures they faced. Shrines, learly influened by Eastern designs, were painted in rough strokes, making them seem like they were seen through a strong wind or haze, enforcing the aura of mysticism that lung to them. A single picture of a royal figure, standing in a garden, long robes of delicate purple. And without a word, two men, each easily the size of two other, normal men, stepped out of a hidden door or from behind a hidden corner, arms folded, their eyes almost growling on their own as they glared down.
"Hello. I'm here to see Mortimer."
They didn't react. Not at all. In fact, it was hard to tell if they were een breathing.
"I know the taste of desert flesh. I am here to see Mortimer. I am here to see The Copper Claw."
The two seemed skeptical, but they did react, at least to the password that Paula had given. Looking at eah other for a little, they seemed to be discussing what to do, without saying a single word. In the end, they parted, opening the path farther into the smoke-filled corridors.
Not much deeper in, the corridor opened up, not with a doorway but simply with a urtain of beads that glimmered in the flickering light of dozens of open flames inside. A tense hush had its laws dug deep into a rowd of people, all of them looking at a round floor, raised chest high in the middle of them. Ywo figures could be made out, olorful clothes, moving about, caught in some strange dance. When one of them flailed his arms wildly, turning his bak to the other and avoiding having the arms aught, them landing a hard blow with one hand as his back turned to the other, the crowd roared, a deafening sound that seemed to linger in the walls of the place. A fight was in progress. Odds were, it was not the first of the day, even this early.
"You do not belong here," a voice said, utting through the dying roar of the rowd quite effectively. A man, dressed in a grey pinstripe suit, stared with harsh and skeptical eyes. He had clearly just turned away from looking at the fight, right before approaching.
"I am here to see The Copper Cl..."
"So I am told," he said, his calm voice cutting in without feeling the slightest bit impolite, somehow.
"Your password was... old."
At the sound of his last word, it seemed like the bottom dropped out of the sound in the large room, like the rumbling and grumbling of the crowd was suddenly far, far away. The walls suddenly felt closer, the opening with the bead curtain so far away. And still, the calm politeness of the man made it impossible to even think of fleeing. Literally impossible. Thinking about it somehow caused images of an empty room to appear in the thought's place.
"Come," he simply said, turning around and walking, without waiting for any kind of response. Under the suit, his body moved in an odd manner, not the stiff way that one might expect from a three-piece suit. And for some reason, the only logical thing seemed to be to follow. It was as if the mind had problems thinking about any other way to act.
The Copper Claw sat in an area set aside for him, and him exclusively. The only others on the round, raised platform behind all the sometimes roaring, sometimes mumbling spectators were people clearly there for his sake. Protection, large guys that looked as if they belonged in the fight in the center and not on the far sidelines. Young women, carrying trays back and forth, clearly servicing him and his crew with food and drinks. One man, who looked young at a distance but clearly aged more up close, stood up by the side of the one who seemed to be The Copper Claw, occassionally whispering things to him, holding a small notebook in his hand and apparently a few more in the pockets of his black suit. Everything felt like it was taken directly out of an old gangster movie. Everything but The Copper Claw himself.
"Sir, the unidentified visitor. She seems harmless."
Somehow, hearing that from the one in pinstripes felt a little hurtful.
"Strangers don't come here," said the man in the middle of the small raised platform, the man who appeared to be The Copper Claw. Remembering Happy Marla, it seemed wise to not assume he was what he claimed, though.
"Everyone here serves a roe, serves a purpose," he drawled, sounding not like he was drunk, but like someone pretending to be drunk, perhaps to sound more harmless. He didn't sond harmless, though, but that could have been just as much because of how he stood out. Most of what he wore seemed to be either some form of silk, or had silk woven into it. Red patterns ran along broad, black strips of cloth that hung from either shoulder like drapes. Had he stood, they would likely have gone to just about his knees. They brought to mind long, silken scarfs, but they were clearly meant as something else entirely. Beneath them, his clothes looked distinctly Asian, like a monk's wardrobe, but embellished to the point of being almost offensively gaudy. Like the not-scarfs, this attire also had waving patterns and what seemed like complex caligraphy symbols woven in, red on black, even where small pieces of silken string tied the front of the clothes shut. He almost looked like a carricature of Asian villainy, except for the fact that his skin, and some of his facial features, looked Mediterranean, perhaps Greek. But above all, he was a large man, and a man of some age, likely a fighter long past his fighting age in the center ring.
"Are you The Copper Claw?"
He grinned, fondling a glass of some dark orange drink, complete with ice and tiny bubbles.
"No," he said, his booming voice managing to cut through a sudden roar from the crowd. "I am Copper Claw. It is a name, not a title."
He spoke slowly and with impeccable pronunciation. Slowly, he rose to his feet, causing the black suited man beside him to perform a slight bow and move away. He was two steps away, but he crossed the distance in one, fairly casual, stride, legs longer than many people's bodies.
"What is a delicate young flower like yourself doing, knowing that name?"
He rose easily one and a half head above everyone else, looking for all intents and purposes like a moving statue with exaggerated proportions. The loose scarfs around his neck drifted in an odd way, as if they were pulled through water, and fell only slowly into place along his wide chest. And in spite of it all, his footsteps were sight enough that they could barely be heard over the now, again, hushed crowd.
"I just... uhm..."
His impressive stature made it a bit harder than usual to speak with confidence, especially when having to look almost straight up into the air just to meet his eyes.
"I have not used that name in a long time. The last one to call me by it...."
With those words, his mind seemed to drift to a diferent place, if only briefly. He tilted his head slightly, a strange grin appearing on his lips.
"... was the witch."
In a disturbing coincidence, the cowd roared at something in the fight as he spoke the last word. It made it all seem as if they cheered for what he said.
"Pili... Polonia... #*@!..."
"Poliantas," the giant man said. "Yes, The Witch of Blades. Although..." He cracked a sly smile, like a small child trying to look cinematically tough. "... we called her somethign just a letter different."
Suddenly, his eyes shifted. His confidence seemed to lay low for a moment, opening his face up to a questioning expression.
"Wait, flower... I know you."
Even without looking around, just out of the corner of the eye, it was painfully clear that everyone in the man's crew was suddenly paying an unusual amount of attention to his words.
"I saw you, years ago. And you looked only a little younger."
His huge hand, long, strong fingers extending out, seemed to block out all light from the room as they floated close by, never touching, but tracing out facial features as they moved, like a blind man feeling a face, but somehow leaving a little distance and never touching.
"You did work for Lullaby and his freaks."
The air had grown tense, even beyond the constant change between roar and hush of the nearby crowd. Everyone in Copper Claws little group was looking, silent, anxious, perhaps fearing what he might do as much as they worried what he was talking about.
"Those were different times."
Copper Claw straightened his back, standing at his full and impressive height.
"All times are different, flower. Lullaby and his misfits are no longer here to protect you. So what on Earth would take you into my den?" He swung a large hand at the crowd with the last few words, his elegant movements looking almost crude because of his ridiculous size.
"The spirits are restless. Things are coming, and while you don't know that, you may be one of the few I can ask what they could mean."
Grunting as he stepped back to sit once again in his large leather chair, the man seemed to throw away his intimidating act. He suddenly seemed more indifferent, more vaguely frustrated, than anything else.
"We don't bother the spirits, flower, and they don't bother us," he all but mumbled, the grand theatrics of his speeches gone, thrown out along with the intimidating attitude. Something had changed. A strange melancholy seemed to be settling on him. He gave no indication why.
"The Leaping Serpents used to be deep into spirits, though, didn't they? I remember the fights you..."
"So you are that girl from long ago," he growled, his brow briefly admitting that there was an anger brewing inside of him. There was little else to do than simply acknowledge it and move on.
"I saw you in 1956, at your height. You tore through oponents with fists and spirits like nobody else."
There were a few nostalgic nods and grunts from some of the older ones in his ensemble, but nobody said anything outright. One, the one in the black suit by Copper Claw's side, seemed less enthusiastic, his eyes simply glaring with distrust at this cocky stranger in their midst, talking to his master as if his equal. There was a smell of rank and hierachy over the lot, of knowing one's place. Talking to the big man without showing proper fear and respect was most likely an offense to some old ashioned mindset here.
"I need to know how the spirits think. I need to know your secrets."
A roar went through the crowd, louder than the ones before it. It was an easy guess that the fight that they were watching was coming to an end. But nobody on Copper Claw's private little platform even looked in that direction.
"I may have some secrets to tell you," the big man growled, a sly smile now again on his face, "but I may want some of your secrets in return, flower."