[Denakot, Tayseri] Rebuilding, Reopening, Reloading [open]

"I'd be upset at thorough surprise fingering too." Juhani laughs, but it's a dry laugh. Fortunately he had a supply of stuff to wet his whistle with.

One swig of the burning stuff (he was drinking to get drunk, not savouring the rich aromas of potato peels in unwashed bathtub) and he was good to go socialize again.

"Now, now if my recollections of Sundowner traditions are right, you cut yourself while you take your oath, hence why it's blood oath, so you pay with your life if you break it. So that mister over here is in for his head if he goes run and sleep with other ladies without permission." Juhani began to explain to best of his capabilities to Peraxus about the consequences of blood oath.

Nikolai laughs again, a soft, warm, delighted sound followed by a gasp that slowly, steadily deepens into heavy breathing. He shrugs his shoulders and his coat slides to the floor with a soft thump.

In the store room Nikolai rolled his eyes at Quatra and prayed to God that she didn't start laughing. Because, honestly, if she did he wasn't entirely sure that he wouldn't be able to keep from joining in. But, in the meantime, there was still business to attend to.

Bad but rebuilding
Presence on Low. Tay.
Assets in C-Space/Terminus
Have Merchant/Transport Ships Relay pass.
Been shipping materials for reconstruction
How to contact Kraava?
No problem with Omega.

The scarred man matches Quatra moan for moan and sincerely hoped that Raelon, wherever he was, was distracted. Every extra minute counted.

"Nobody you can run over, got it..."

It couldn't be that hard to find a boy for Trex. She was cute (allegedly, to Kayana all turians looked sharp and severe). Martial, loyal, that perfectionistic streak, those were traits that turians liked, right?

It was going to be impossible. She'd have better luck finding a boy for Raelon, and Raelon was just sad. "Nah, I'm not going to let him at it. It's kind of a drell pride thing. More that I nearly melted my console."

She followed Trex over to the computer bank, climbing into one of the chairs. "Do what? Is Trex conspiring against me? Again?"

"Juhani's got the basic idea," Battis says, returning with baby Tarko in his arms. "The vow to the land's usually done when they're about Tarko's age here, but me an' Ahsaala, we decided to wait on that. We figured Tarko should be old enough to choose to make a vow like that, considerin' he's gonna be bound by it if he does an' considerin' he wasn't even born on North Solregit."

He passes the baby to Peraxus--whether Peraxus wants the kid or not--and continues his story, now using his free hands to make more elaborate gestures.

"If you believe in that sort of thing, breaking a blood oath doesn't just get you shot by the elders, it also damns your soul to the seventh hell, which is the worst of them. So basically it's no fooling around. You're saying you're giving your life and part of your identity to the clan as a whole. Wasn't so hard for me. Felt good to have a family that wanted me."

He looks back at Juhani, "Oh no, we did not make blood oaths for a marriage. A few folks have, but they're generally considered pretty dumb to. If your mate dies, or loses her mind, or turns traitor...you'd never be able to have sex with anyone ever again, for the rest of time, an' if you even acted just a bit on attraction to someone else, you'd have to be shot. You don't think dyin' gets you out of a blood oath, do you?"

Trex reaches over Raelon's shoulder, not the slightest bit bothered by the fact that he smells vaguely of some kind of chemical under the smoke haze, and activates a recording.

"Kay, when you say boys make you stupid, you mean like this?"

Raelon taps his omni-tool with a skeletal talon, and an image flickers to life on the monitor nearest Kayana. It's Vindi, elbows on a table, hands on her cheeks, gazing at something with a dreamy smile on her face. "Okay, two factors here. First, nobody's got any fancy gun deserving of that kind of a reaction. Second, her eyes are focused. She's not detached and not in a dream world. And what she's looking at is...."

The image moves. Notras Khutonax, cleaning his sniper rifle.

"She could talk to him. But he's totally fixed on his job. And she's totally fixed on staring at him."

Trex looks at Kayana, "What do you think?"

Trex and Kayana have a follower. Aira has returned from the new turian couple as they didn't show any signs of needing food and beverages from her. She peeks over and between them at the monitors, minding the scary shaman Raelon had matured into. Why didn't Vindi have him healed, it was not like the range was out of credits?

"What's going on over there?" she points a talon at one of the monitors, the one that's darkened and has funny sounding sounds coming from it...like a mature woman groaning and moaning. Someone hadn't hurt themselves or had they?

"I've definitely stared at pretty boys that way. Pretty stupid looking, huh?" She smiled, leaning in to look at the console. "It's kind of cute."

"...Wait, is he at all interested? Yee Sundowner relationship chart is complicated enough without adding unrequited lust." "

Raelon types in a code. The image changes.

The time stamp is several months ago, the wee hours of the morning, after the bar has closed down and the staff gone to bed. In the kitchen, Vindi stands at the stove, stirring something in a frying pan. A robe is draped over a empty chair. She's wearing a strappy tank top and soft thigh-length sleep shorts.

Notras Khutonax sits at a table, nursing a steaming cup of tisane, but his gaze is intensely fixed on Vindi.

A splintered mandible swings out of Raelon's hood. Trex pokes him. "Stop leering."

He snorts and zooms in the camera, so Kayana can see the movement of Notras' eyes, very obviously checking Vindi out.

Raelon resets the image, and none too soon. Vindi glances over her shoulder, mouth moving, as though asking him something, and he blinks--about as much startlement as that man ever shows--and answers. Vindi turns back to the stove, adds spices. Behind her, unseen, Notras angles his eyes towards the floor.

Ahsaala, alerted by Aira's words, draws on the little girl's hand. She hears those noises and has a pretty good idea what's going on. "Someone's inspecting the ammunition, honey."

Which means that in a few months' time they'll have a little bomb of joy on their hands, just like she and Battis.

"Here, Aira, do you want to hold Tarko?"

Because, matronly or not, Ahsaala can't resist taking another peek at the monitor, wondering just *who* it is.

The door stays frustratingly closed.

Quatra's keening rises in intensity. Her handwriting becomes more of a scrawl...even this mockery is exhausting.

Kraava: Stashed secure comm link in duct cache
We need to meet up
Next week [time indicating middle of usual sleep cycle]
Duct under the Bloody Bayonet Bar
??

She looks at him at what would be the height of her "orgasm," as though breathlessly shuddering on the edge of release.

Peraxus wordlessly cuffed Juhani around the back of the head at his comment.

"So it's kinda what I tho- wha- hey!" Peraxus broke off, spluttering in surprise as he's unceremoniously handed a baby. He held the child out at arm's length, staring at it as if Battis just handed him a live grenade. He looked around, clearly searching for someone else to give the baby to. Eventually he just thrusts it back into Battis' claws with a glare.

"An' what if you're already damned to the seventh hell?" Peraxus asked dryly. "Or you had some experience with Sepper clans an' don't want to see it go down the same road?"

Juhani merely laughs when Peraxus gives him the much-deserved rap of the knuckles.

"Peraxus, I thought it was your chest and not your butt that got hurt!" he giggles mirthfully, if not with hints of schadenfreude. Looks like the alcohol is starting to get better of him...

Meanwhile at Raelon's altar of monitors, Aira doesn't buy the explanation of inspecting ammunitions. "Did the lady have a box fall on her toe? It sounds like it! Where is that room?" she pipes up and shakes Raelon's hand, if he'd know better than she did.

"So the nuclear story it is."
Jaquento needed a moment to get the details together.
"That was one of our earliest missions. Colonies were going dark everywhere and this one was one of our biggest ezoo mining colonies before the war. Operation "Night Terror", the planet had the name Gargouille and colony was the size of the hundredthousands. Our task was to get in there, see what happened and do anything necessary to deny the element zero to the reapers. We got a tank and backpacks with tactical nukes. Wait a second..."

He went of to get a fresh bottle of salarian ale and a snack from the bar.

"The mission started slow, no enemies in sight, so we decided to head for the administration center and look for intel. But it is never that easy, is it? We poked into a hornet nest, but at least we got out there alive and with one more than we went in. The person in question was a quarian that was stuck there during the assault, malnutritioned, injured, but alright. The moment we stabilized her a reaper patrol caught us. So the reapers were now onto us, husks and cannibals, the place was crawling when we reached the tank and got out there. There was one thing left to do so we headed for the mines.In the maws of hell rode the six hundred."

From here, Jaquento's voice became increasingly monotone and his eyes started to fixated something only he could see.

"It was dark, the air was contaminated with ezoo and the veins were shimmering in a blueish pruple. We drove down as far as we could, the reaper forces left behind. We should have known that such a presence could only mean they were protecting something. And that something... Just as we reached an open area we saw it, it was large, it was made out of part and... I should have known that somehting wasn't right earlier. I have trace of ezoo in me, enough to give me headaches, like the one I started to have as we went down there. That thing... I felt like my head would split open, I don't know if it was the pain or that thing that spoke to me... assaulted me. I was helpless and a team mate had to help me arm the device and drag me out of there. Intel was right, the reapers were cooking up something special to break our forces and if that thing would have gotten out... I... I am just glad that am still sane. At least our teams biotic was alright, I think her implants protected her from... that."
Jaquento shook his head as if he were just awaken.
"We made it to the tank and got the hell out of that death trap, from the frigate we view how that ezoo vein, hell most of the planet was torn apart by an improvised warp bomb and I must say..."
He mimiced a spanish accent.
"...it was the most premium explosion I ever witnessed."

Kayana watched the clip on the screen.

"It's frigging adorable is what it is." She squinted a little, then straightened up, stretching. "And I say that as someone who has a healthy fear of your sister. They look like different people."

"But that was months ago. Nothing's happened since then?"

Just then a man strolled into the range, towing behind him one of those huge cases that by now might well be a trademark of his appearance. He looked exceptionally tired, though it was clearly more for lack of sleep than physical exhaustion, as the case was suspended off the ground by a small mass effect field and effectively weighed nothing. His own building's range had not yet been completed, so he requested the use of Miss Detticia's in exchange for a product preview and a reasonable fee. The former was what he was currently lugging around. One would think that a person in his position would have hired somebody to serve that purpose exclusively, but he adamantly refused to. He dragged the case up to the lobby desk, ignoring the sounds around him as he addressed the greeter.

"Hello there. Marcus Lyons here. There should be a handful of lanes reserved for me at around this time, correct?" He folded his arms on the counter and settled into a more relaxed position leaning just slightly over them. "Now granted, I don't intend to go around chasing off your customers, but I would like those wishing to view and use my latest designs to sign NDAs prior to doing so. That's not too much to ask, is it?"

There were a number of small gouges on his face, in random places but all aligned so that one end pointed toward his nose, like he was looking at something as it exploded. The sides of the little marks were seared in place, and they looked somehow old and fresh at the same time. As always, he had either failed or neglected to find a synthetic eye that matched his natural one, leaving the former electric blue and the latter a steel variant of the same shade.

Raelon says to Kayana, "I have a collection of these types of vids--you've only seen the first, for a couple months after the Reapers were defeated, those two were all business, then slowly this pattern emerged and solidified. Everyone here thinks I'm on drugs....well...heh, I am on drugs," he glances at the pipe, "but anyone would be, in my condition, and the tablets the hospital gave me make me sleep all day. I'd rather be high and surfing the extranet than unconscious all the time--if I'm going to do that, I may as well be dead, right?"

Still, he seems to be rationing himself. Most of the poppy smell is stale, almost floral. What's in the pipe is a very small lump of charred resin.

"Anyway, drugs aside, nobody else believes me enough to watch the evidence, except Trex. And yes, this is what they do. There's one vid from a month ago where Vindi reaches out to touch him, thinks twice, and draws her hand back..."

Trex interrupts, "It's sad, is what it is. Neither of them so much as look at anyone else."

He nodded in reply and began unbuttoning his shirt, carefully rumpling his clothes with one hand while he passed Quatra the rag with the other. Nikolai held up three fingers. Two fingers. One. As his hand formed a fist he moaned, long, low, and satisfied.

If anything is worth doing it's worth doing properly. The maxim covered everything from tedious paperwork to clandestine business meetings disguised as casual, heterosexual, quickies.

Still panting for the benefit of anyone listening in, Nikolai glanced meaningfully up at the blinded camera, then at the door. Their little performance had been genuine enough that nobody had been particularly inclined to bother them. Now that they had finished however, it was only a matter of time before someone came along to shoo them out.

"Wow... When you look back, we we're just up to assholes in Husks during the Siege of Ottawa."

"True, but to be fair, we did get our share of action. Rememer the Cerberus cell?"

"Da, Hannah." Dmitri says, before turning to Jaquento. "During the Siege of Ottawa, there was this Cerberus Cell based in the East End of Ottawa that somehow managed to lay low before trying this experiment. Their orders were to 'observe the effects of husk attacks on cities with a low Reaper presence', whatever the hell that means. And aparently that meant they needed to blow up our damn motor pool."

"We were the squad that actually foiled that attempt. The Chief here managed to knock two of 'em out with this crowbar. Those two ended up facing the firing squad. The rest were KIA." PFC Levesque said.

Jovina smiled broadly at the baby. "Oh he's <i>fantastic</i>. Congratulations!"

He was small, about the same age Aelia had been when she and Sirane had arrived. Maybe that's why Susrix, following his sister like a shadow that didn't know quite what to do with himself, was looking at him with such a strange, tender, look in his eyes. He'd missed a good half of his daughter's first year with the war.

"What's his name?" he asked.

The biotic shrugged at Marius' question. "There isn't as much cleanup work and now that the surgery and PT are finished, having three less things in my schedule makes it a lot easier. But I can't say my actual work has let up. I'm not sure how much longer I'll be there though - there has been some talk and I think they're trying to figure out whether or not to re-establish the Palaven academy now that the relays are back up."