Songs: Fleetwood Mac - Tusk; Esma Redzepova - Romano Horo
"Here. Kvass for all of you, except Tina, because Tina prefers tea." Anouk said and put down a bunch of jars full of kvass on the table.
"You know it, girl." Tina replied with a big grin on her face and reached for the can that had the tea in it. I took a big sip from my jar of kvass. We had finally reached Sindor and it was truly a small village. There were a few bakeries and a few guest houses. A little bit outside the town there was the sawmill Anouk had told me about. Apart from that and a bunch of wooden cabins, there wasn't really much more here.
We had gone to one of the guest houses, because that was the only place we could stay for the night. Anouk told us we had a maximum of two weeks to find the Vault Key piece. She had to go back to work after that and we'd be on our own. I really didn't want that, especially since we were so new to the planet.
"Alright, so how do we start asking people about these disappearances?" Mordecai wanted to know.
"I guess we ask them?" Brick suggested. Anouk was shaking her head.
"No, don't just go and ask around. Just wait. People will notice that we're not from around here and they'll ask questions. I got the okay from my boss at the company and from the party secretary to go and investigate. I've got my party badge somewhere here as well. People will be cooperative once that is out. Just don't be all up in their faces, they won't like that." she explained.
"What kind of a powerful position exactly are you in?" I wanted to know. Party badge? Position in the company? That all sounded like way more bureaucracy and order than I was used to from Pandora. They had stuff like that in Aquator, but everyone would be very quiet if they saw that someone had to do with the government.
"I'm in no powerful position. I've only got a small team. But the disappearances came up and when I asked for my leave, I brought it up again and offered to go and investigate a little. So I got a few permission slips here that we can use to our advantage." she said with a smile and patted a pocket on her woollen coat.
"I dunno, sounds like you got all the power in the world to me, girl." Tina commented and raised an eyebrow.
"Well, maybe I've got a few more privileges. At the moment." Anouk answered with a sigh and then smiled at us.
"It's wild to me that people actually trust their government here…" Mordecai mumbled and looked around at the people sitting there. Most of them looked like they had just finished work. A lot of them had some axes with them. Some seemed to be in some sort of traditional clothes, which consisted of wide pants and long cotton shirts. Most of them had big furry hats like the one I had bought.
"Should we get some food, too? I mean, it seems we'll be here for a while." I asked. Brick nodded.
"Yeah, good point. I'm pretty hungry." he mumbled.
"Already got food, it'll just take a little while to be ready." Anouk replied and smiled at someone who was approaching slowly. He seemed to be a lumberjack and there was someone following him with a bit of distance.
"Sorry, are these seats still free?" he wanted to know.
"Sure, yeah. Sit down." Anouk answered quickly. He waved his friend over to us and they sat down at our table.
"You're not from around here." he then said matter-of-factly.
"No, we're not. I'm from Vavozh and my friends here are visiting from Pandora." Anouk introduced us. The two of them seemed surprised.
"Pandora? You're from off-planet? Well, that's something we don't have every day. You're not Hyperion or anything, are you?" the other one wanted to know. I quickly shook my head no.
"We're not. We're with the…"
I glanced over to Anouk and she quickly nodded.
"We're with the Crimson Raiders." I finished my sentence. I wasn't sure how favourably people here thought of the Raiders and getting people all up against us was probably not a good idea right away.
"Ah, yes, the Raiders. We heard of you. Fighting against that fascist Jack. You seem to be good people." the first guy said.
"We try." Brick commented, looking a bit like a fish out of water. The thing was none of us were really good people. Maybe fighting against Jack was a good thing we did, but we still weren't good people.
"My name is Anouk, this is my mother Nova, her partner Mordecai and their friends Brick and Tina. What are your names?" Anouk quickly introduced us, before we could let it slip that we really weren't great people.
"My name is Mikhail and my comrade here is Pavel. We're lumberjacks, working out in the forests." the first guy said. I almost choked on my kvass when I heard the word 'comrade'. I always thought that was just a stereotype, but apparently it was true. I really had to hold back in order to not start grinning all over.
"It's good to meet you." Anouk simply said and gestured towards the can of tea, offering them some. This seemed to be a fairly common thing, since they accepted without any fuss and poured themselves a cup of tea each.
"Good to meet you, too. What brings you to Sindor?" Pavel asked, before sipping from his tea.
"My friends are just visiting, we're travelling through. Decided to stop by here for a while. I work for Vladof and the party has sent me to investigate some of the disappearances while I was here. Have there been any lately?" Anouk wanted to know. The two of them looked at each other.
"There have actually been a few lately. They've been kind of odd, though. Usually they happened in one specific part of the forest, but the ones lately have happened closer to the village and the complete opposite direction of the other disappearances." Mikhail answered. Pavel just nodded gravely.
"That is strange. When did that start?" Anouk wanted to know.
"Not too long ago. Pavel here can probably tell you more." Mikhail replied and nodded towards the young man sitting next to him. He now had a stern expression on his face and sighed.
"What happened, comrade?" Anouk wanted to know. I glanced over at Mordecai and Brick, but they were mostly observing the situation like me. It seemed that people here just went about their lives quite differently, so it was probably best to keep quiet and let Anouk do the talking for now.
"When we were kids, my younger brother and I were playing out in the forest and he disappeared. I heard something there, some sort of monster, but I couldn't see much, I was running back home. My brother never came back. All of us have been staying away from that part of the forest since then, but a few days ago my sister went missing. She never went anywhere near there, she was at the other end of town." he explained, his face looking sad and bitter.
"So you think this was because of two different things?" I asked him. It had to be. There had to be two different causes for these missing people.
"That's what I think. But I don't know. There have been rumours…" he answered and then got quiet, looking around nervously.
"Rumours? What rumours, comrade?" Anouk asked. Someone from another table leaned over to us.
"They're saying that the loyalists are gathering outside of town. That they wanna attack the sawmill, since we're so far out and take over more of the country. I say they wouldn't waste their time, since we are really far out, but who knows. They might be getting desperate." this guy said.
"Well, you're not taking anything seriously, Sasha!" the woman who presumably owned the guest house shouted at him.
"At least I'm not worried about things that will never happen all the time." the man called Sasha replied. I shot a glance at Anouk, but she just smiled happily. When she looked at me, I gave her a worried look.
"It's all going according to plan. Don't worry, they'll soon have the whole place talking about whatever they saw and we can figure out what most likely happened later. For now, we can just soak up as much information as possible." Anouk said to me quietly. I nodded and tried following the conversation again.
"Lately people have gone missing near the sawmill, alright. No point denying that. The forest to the other side of town is dangerous as well, but few people still go near there. When I was a kid I've seen something there. Was huge. Like one massive animal. There's a theory that it might be one of the last of a race of animals that's believed to be extinct. We've found some remains and fossils of them around that area, but then the disappearances started happening and we stopped looking into it." another man said. The man called Sasha was shaking his head.
"Those are children's tales!" he shouted and started eating again. Pavel was shaking his head slowly.
"I don't know whether they're children's tales or not and I don't care. All I know is, there is something out there and I've seen it with my own eyes and it's taken my brother. And there is something else near the sawmill and I'd bet that's where my sister disappeared. She's been around there a lot lately, anyway." he told us.
"Seems like we're dealing with two different things then. Does anyone have a map of this town? Since we're here to investigate all this, any bit of information would help, really. And we'd have to go and have a look at both areas, too." Anouk explained. Mikhail glanced at the woman behind the bar.
"Anyushka should have some holo maps…" he said.
"They're not cheap! I can't just give them away like that." Anyushka shouted at us. Anouk nodded quickly.
"Don't worry, we'll pay for one. It's not easy to get holo maps these days, I understand." she replied and got up from her seat.
"If you're from the party, why don't you just ask for a map? I'm sure they have them in the archives." Anyushka answered.
"I could do that, but I'm afraid they are very slow processing requests at the moment. There's lots going on and we wouldn't be able to get one in time. I can pay for one, no problem. And of course I'll mention your kindness when I write my report." Anouk reassured her. That seemed to win her over and she started looking for one of the microchips that had a holo map of the town and the surrounding area on it.
"This all feels very unreal and strange…" Brick whispered. I nodded. Things here felt very different to what we all were used to. On Pandora we could just shoot our way to wherever we needed to go. Here, things were different. We needed to be diplomatic and strategic and that was probably not really something we were used to. At least not to the degree that was needed.
"I think the best for us to do right now is to lean back and let Anouk handle this. She obviously knows what's going on and how to win these people over. I'll ask her about all this stuff later. Until then we'd be best off to enjoy our food and our tea." I replied. Tina seemed happy enough about that.
"Yeah, man, the tea here is the shit!" she answered.
"I might be getting the hang of what's going on, but it's a very different political system. We should definitely sit down with Anouk later and ask her for an explanation. This'll be hard to navigate otherwise." Mordecai suggested.
"Yup, good idea. I'm pretty lost half the time." I agreed.