"...including once getting his jaw broken, which had only been fun in a no-fun-at-all kind of way."

-- Moist von Lipwig, Going Postal

Two conmen walked into a bar…

Well. No. Let me rephrase that.

One ex-conman, now respectable banker and Postmaster General, walked into a bar. He was trailed by a concat, a plump old tom going grey at the pawtips who looked quite pleased with himself.

The conman, whose name was Moist – don't say it – headed determinedly for an empty stool, dropping the occasional handful of change when the crush of the crowd became too heavy and there was no open path. This cleared the area in front of him pretty well, although at this time of night it was a rather expensive habit. Eventually he reached the counter and sat down, swinging his legs idly in a way reminiscent of nothing so much as a six year old boy on a rainy afternoon.

Maurice almost stalked up to him then, but changed his mind at the last moment and stayed put, a few meters away. He, of course, had had no trouble, but then he had a set of claws and teeth at his disposal and no qualms about using them. Ethel always did have funny ideas about violence.

He watched as the man rapped the tabletop smartly with his knuckles. Watched as the barmaid, a well-built woman(a), appear, club in hand and threatening comment about "smart-arses who thinks they can call me like a godsdamned slave". Watched Ethel duck the swing. He approved: clearly his reflexes, at least, had not gone to pot. Watched him give the lass a charming smile and ask for a dozen pints, please.

The night was beginning to look more and more promising, Maurice thought to himself.

The drinks arrived, in grudging – but also slightly admiring – procession(b). Ethel immediately snatched the first one and drank it down in one swallow. Maurice edged closer.

Another glass, filled and emptied. Maurice was within a foot of the man's shoe, now.

A third.

"Hullo," said Maurice brightly, as Ethel was finishing his fourth and looking speculatively at the next in the row.

"Hmm?" said Ethel, fingers closing around the glass.

"Down here."

"Wha… Maurice?"

"In the flesh."

"What're you. Doing. Here, I mean?"

"Checking up on an old friend, o' course. Good job too, look at you mate. If I weren't here you'd be utterly sloshed right now."

"I am sloshed –" Ethel pointed out, but Maurice was already on the counter, lapping at one of the mugs.

"Here, thassmine!"

"Indulge an old friend."

Ethel subsided. He seemed a bit too drunk to catch the subtle threat. Maurice sighed; he would probably have to wait 'til later.

No one else had noticed the talking cat on bar property, it looked like, so he settled down and regarded Ethel soulfully. This had little apparent effect.

"Heyheyheyhey," the man said, with all the cheerfulness of a drunk in Stage 4, Happy Homicide. "D'you remember, that time we, mm, we went on that uh, uh, uh, date with y'know-who, wossname, Dianne?" He sipped at one of the pints, first burst of thirst apparently sated.

"Er," said Maurice, and then, "oh dear…"

(a) Well-built in the sense that, for instance, a barrel is well-built.

(b) The phrase should be taken as literally as possible, because not only was the barmaid arranging them admiring, so were the drinks. Water in the Mended Drum invariably took on a life of its own.

--

It'd been a dark and stormy night, the night when Maurice came up with the idea of winning the heart of Dianne Trubucket, daughter of the richest sheep-merchant in town. They should have taken it as an omen. They hadn't.

"Trubucket?" said Ethel, then a nineteen year old who had learned quite a lot about the world since they'd met. "The one with the square jaw and the nose like a hammer?"

"You mean it looks like a hammer hit it?" said Maurice, distracted momentarily from his Plan.

"No," said Ethel, "I mean it looks like a hammer. The front end, obviously. With the flattened knob, as it were(a)."

"Sure," said Maurice dismissively. He had better things to do than look at blobby human things all day. "Anyways. As I was saying. Win her heart. Win her father's money. That kind of thing."

"You don't expect me to marry her?" said the lad, horrified (and it took a good deal to horrify Ethel, these days).

"No, no, of course not! We just need to get into her house."

"Oh. Okay." Ethel relaxed. Slightly.

He really, really should have known better.

(a) Moist's descriptive powers had not yet undergone the, er, fine-tuning it would acquire in his later years.

--

It should have been so simple.

Ethel was good at what he did, after all. Maurice prided himself on being a gifted teacher, but, really, quite a bit of it was natural talent. They'd already scammed several thousands of dollars out of various gullible young women, and the lad hadn't yet reached twenty. He had a way about him, though, part charm and part innocence and part willingness to wear ridiculous moustaches at any given moment. (Maurice was starting to get a little worried about that particular habit, actually.) It had always worked in the past.

They started the next day. The lighting made Ethel's ever-indeterminately colored hair look blondish, and he'd added to his normal costume a jaunty cap with a feather in(a), a small, suspiciously bristling straw-colored moustache(b), and a brilliant grin. Dianne was quite taken with him the moment he bumped into her at the marketplace: it could be seen.

"I'm so sorry!" she said. "Are you all right?" She bent over to help him up.

"I'm fine," said Ethel, adding perhaps a smidgen too much 'gruff and macho' to his tone. Maurice held his breath, but all seemed to be well, because she replied "Oh no you're not! Look at that bruise!"

It was a very small bruise. Ethel colored. It might even have been genuine, that blush, though the bruise certainly wasn't: he'd dabbed it on with a bit of make-up only half an hour earlier. Several other customers within earshot started to titter.

"Er," he muttered, "'s nothing, just a scratch…"

"A scratch!" she exclaimed. "A scratch, my arse." Then she seemed to recall that she was talking to a Young Man, and added hurriedly "Pardon my Klatchian."

It was at that point that the manager came rushing in, yelling about the produce damaged in the collision, and all were forced to flee. Ethel considered it a profitable encounter over all, however, because he overheard her parting words:

"Come to my house later, I'll give you a salve for it, dear."

(a) The leading fashion in Uberwald for young males on the move, thanks to generations of horror movies in other universes entirely.

(b) Which he kept and added to his now considerable collection. Maurice, it must be said, quite often considered therapy.

--

"Y'know," said Ethel, to no one in particular, as they were walking to her house later that evening, "that woman's arse is bonier than a… a very bony thing."

"And you would know this… how?" Maurice retorted.

"What do you think? I had to bump into it!"

"It?"

Ethel glared at him.

"Okay, okay, I get it," said the cat, "you're not going any farther than need be. We just need to get in, hit her over the head, get cash, get out."

"Huh. Fine for you to say," said Ethel.

Maurice was about to respond indignantly to this particular implication when they came up to the front door of the rather grand house, which opened without even a single knock from Ethel's lifted fist.

"Why, hello," said the monstrosity before them.

There were so many layers of horror that it was difficult to know where to start.

There was the make-up, of course. She had used some sort of thick white foundation, overlaid with extremely red lips and bright pink circles where, once upon a time, quite innocent cheeks had hung plumply from her mandibles. At some point there must have been a reasonable attempt at eyelining and mascara, but since then it had clumped and dripped in every imaginable unflattering way.

There was the hair. Clearly a wig, the chestnut, curling mass was hanging only precariously onto her skull, heavy naturally and adorned with additional weights that were tasteless but, it should be mentioned, very sparkly.

There was the nighty, which appeared to be made of a few scraps of silk and a whole lot of lace, and would have been revealing and clingy on any other person. To be fair it also clung to and revealed of Dianne Trubucket; it was just that it clung to all the wrong places and revealed all the wrong things.

But worst of it all was the perfume

It came in great, all-enveloping gusts. It penetrated and adhered to any solid surface unfortunate enough to be in its way(a). It smelled like rotting flowers and, er, rotting non-flowers, too.

It was, in short, the most expensive perfume in the world, Captivation(b).

"Please do come in," it – she continued.

"Yes'm," Ethel squeaked, and – at prodding by Maurice, whose battered, scarred, half-torn-off nose was impervious to even the most pungent of perfumes – edged inside, keeping as far from the source of the odor as possible in the narrow doorway.

"Are you all right, dear? The bruise isn't paining you too much?" said Dianne, voice dripping with sympathy and concern. "Here, what is your name again?"

"Charles," he managed. Maurice was just glad he'd remembered the name they'd agreed on and hadn't blurted out Ethel, which could have been distinctly disastrous.

"Well, Charles, if you could just open up your shirt a little so that I could apply the salve?" She brandished a small glass bottle of some unidentifiable greenish substance threateningly.

Too dazed by the Smell to resist, Ethel fumbled with the top button of his vest for a moment before peeling it away to reveal the culprit. Dianne, of course, made a great fuss over it, cooing and making other strange and unnatural noises as she slathered on a thick covering of goo. Ethel gave him a despairing look.

Maurice sighed. Obviously he was going to have to do this himself.

"Mrow!" he said, loudly. Dianne turned around slightly, and saw the cat. "Oh, a wittle putty tat, isn't he adora-"

That was as far as she got before he pounced.

Girl and cat went down as one screaming entity, clawing at each other in a desperate bid for freedom.

Ethel, under the impression that their victim was distracted, reached down to grab one of the sparkly, tasteless, and highly expensive hair-things.

Unfortunately, he had gravely miscalculated his would-be victim's response.

"It bit me!" she shrieked, coming up briefly for air – before seeing Ethel with one guilty hand stuck in her hair. "Oh – you – you –"

Finding words, even her Klatchian, inadequate, she brought her free arm (Maurice was viciously attacking the other) around. It connected with his jaw with a solid cracking noise and sent the boy sprawling backwards. He yelped like a little girl, Maurice was satisfied to note. Nevertheless, it looked like it was time to get out of here. He leaped from her shoulder towards the still-open door, and Ethel had enough sense to pick himself up and follow at high speed before she could recover enough to stand.

(a) Moist would spend days trying to get it out of his good clothes, and the moustache carried a lingering trace of it ever after.

(b) Dianne had attended the Quirm School For Young Ladies. She had been several years below Sybil Ramkin, but Her Ladyship was a kind and generous gel. Probably.

--

"Cheer up," said Maurice, "doc said it'll heal within a fortnight."

"Shut. Up," said Ethel, through the forcibly clenched teeth caused by a brace for a broken jaw.

"You have to admit," said Maurice, "she had a damn fine right hook."

He went to bed with his own scar that night, as it happened, though he liked to think that the lovely new scratches adorning his partner's arm suggested that he'd given as good as he'd got.

--

"Good times, good... times!" Ethel said happily, some twelve years later.

"Good times?"

"Yeah, yeah. Y'know," he confided, leaning forwards towards the cat, who promptly backed away from the approaching stink of alcohol, "the girl I'm seeing now you wouldn't believe."

"Oh?"

"Yeah. She's uh, y'know, she smokes, right?"

Maurice tried to raise his eyebrows. Since he was a cat, this was tricky, but the thought was there.

"Yeah. So. And she wears these shoes."

"Shoes?"

"Yeah. Uh. Pretty - pretty Lucy? Lucianne? Lulu? Lucratitive? Nononono. Lucretia!"

"Huh?"

"The shoes," Ethel explained patiently. "They're called Pretty Lucretia."

"Oh. Right. Of course."

"Yeah. So anyways. Uhm." He fell sideways slightly, then pulled himself back up. "Yeah. They got... they got spikes!"

"What have spikes?"

"The shoes!"

Maurice gave up, and had himself another gulp of liquor.

"Nonono, lissen. Them. The shoes," Ethel persisted, "the shoesies, she spiked someone with 'em. So. Yeah. Now I call her... Spike."

Maurice patted the man on the shoulder as he slumped gently backwards. "I begin to see," he said, "how you can call getting your jaw broken good times."

A/N: UNTIL NEXT TIME AHAHAHAHA.

...yeah. Maybe continued, maybe not.