"I'm certain you're not talking about anything, like, illegal," Lainey says flatly. "I'm a loyal citizen of our Empire, as, I am sure, are you." Then she stuffs her hands in her pockets and blows out a long, smokey breath, sparks flickering over her fangs. "The patronage of someone higher up than me wouldn't hurt my boy's future any, though. He's not gemini-class but he's got some ability, and— well, you know, like, I'm really going to get my own ship? It'd be asking enough just to get posted with him." In a small, awkward voice: "I don't think we're going to be turning in much of a pail. If any."
"Of course not," you say to her first sentence. "It's not illegal for a member of the command classes to have ideas for bettering the Empire, within the law and under the guidance of our beloved Empress, naturally." In a more natural voice, you go on, "I don't know how much influence I can have for trolls outside my clade after Ascension, so I can't make promises there. But I do have an idea that might help. What if I bring you guys in to document the next major reenactment battle? Various commanders tend to have their own hired fan club or use camera drones, but we don't often get an objective enough broad-view that we can really dissect what went down. The big picture. If you had the tech for it, do you think you two could manage that? Without getting shot?" You have to pause to clean your fluffcheep with a pinch of snow, because he's managed to pee on his foot. Then you look up at Lainey with a smile. "I've got a lot of allies and positive contacts. Arguss could make a good impression with a handful of cobalts and indigoes I can recommend who treat their troops honorably, and know the value of keeping partners together."
"Hhhhm," Lainey says, thinking about it. "We've already got a lot of long-range recording devices, obviously, and practice using 'em, but I never seriously thought about game reporting. The Let's Play guys tend to be, like, pretty hardcore, and it never seemed worth the hits. Like, fashion's a pretty niche interest but it's a lot easier to manage, and paired up with gossip and ship-spotting it's a respectable enough subject, you know? But if I had an invite, and a set list of subjects or events or whatever to cover... yeah, I'll run the idea past him. It sounds worth a try." She looks vastly relieved, and goes to gently hassle the fluffcheep with her boot-tip.
"It might be fun to have a gossip angle on the games. I could give you some starting points. I tend not to pay attention to the ships and intrigues beyond what might be strategically useful, but I do keep an ear to the ground. For instance, Lady Belwas flipped black on her middle leaf last season, and this season he's fielding a squad of skirmishers on the opposite side. Is he flirting back, or just staying as far away from her as possible? Hell if I know; beyond 'neither of them will probably shoot to kill' it's not my purview. But it might interest you guys." The fluffcheep scoots between your knees to hide from either Lainey or the wind, and you give an exasperated sigh. "You gonna tell me with everything you ate today, all you're going to do is pee? You better not explode on my shirt."
Lainey draws herself up, intrigued. "Oh, I heard all about that flip, it was kind of a drama bomb and Belwas had always been really boring, for a violet-- she dropped like, all her hobbies for awhile, didn't she? Some blogs figured it for a snit but I called it a broken spade-- I bet you anything she and whatsisface are going to need a new leaf. I couldn't say about the shooting situation, I don't know how big a deal it is to actually try to kill someone you're warring against." With great concentration, the fluffcheep hunches up and poops on Bel's boot.
You sigh deeply, looking down at his proud little face, and shake your head. "Such is life." Result: you end up chattering about battle rules and highblood quadrant drama while cleaning tiny-carnivore poop off your boot with wads of snow and whatever cleaning products you can find in your sylladex. It's a unique experience. "Next battle's live fire," you explain. "You don't get extra points for killing, but the weapons are real, and holding back can mean you lose. On the other hand, using lethal force excessively can get you on people's shitlists, or even start revenge cycles. Balancing live ammo with the fact that your enemies tonight might be your allies next season -- that's part of the challenge."
Lainey's interest continues— if a bit more keenly focused on romantic stratagems than martial— and they wind up sketching diagrams for one another in the snow until a shiver and sneeze from Lainey melts it all into slush. "Damn," she says, snuffling and rubbing at her brightly teal nose. "Sorry, I forgot to keep my temp up. You wanna—" she looks around vaguely, "— go somewhere, I don't know, I don't think I could eat again. Might be a media aggregate or something open this early, if you want to draw on an actual table."
You hadn't even noticed how cold you were getting in the nose and fingers regions. Your coat is nice and warm, but you've got it open, and the fluffcheep is unusually burrowy in the front of your hoodie. "Good idea," you agree. "Let's see what we can find." What you find is a 24-hour coffee shop a little bit off the tourist path, with mismatched tables and a wall of terrible art. The coffee tastes kind of burnt at this hour, but it's warm, and you get a little sauce cup of steamed milk for the fluffcheep for free because the barista thinks he's adorable. The pastry case is empty, but there are glorious smells of baking wafting from the noisy little kitchen, so you're pretty sure you know what you're doing for breakfast. You get out one of your larger blank books and a packet of colored pencils, and position it in the center of the small table so you can both draw on it. "Right, so I think you were trying to explain Corbin Whatsisface's juggling act. I just know him as the artillery mover guy. I guess having a big vehicle makes you popular in other ways."
Laine snickers and goes for the red and black pencils. "Okay, okay! You gotta admit there's a certain appeal to higher calibers, though. Anyway. Corbin's just a notch or two into indigo and really huffy about it, obviously, he's been trying to scrabble his way into violet social rings for a while now, but he shot his wad like, last sweep, when he double-crossed his fishface matesprit— Deliah, maybe you know her?— to try and set himself up as boss of a gang of cobalts. I'm not surprised you stayed out of it, but I'm a little surprised you didn't hear about it, he got the ass-kicking of the century. Deliah is an admirably huge bitch and apparently a lousy concupiscent partner, so like, Corbin got some help putting himself back together from some other violets, but it was strictly to tick her off and weirdly enough no one wanted a quadrant filled by a social climber, and a really inept one, at that. " So Corbin is down a few limbs and enough horn that he starts working— you said artillery, so that's like, behind the scenes kind of shit? logistics? I just know that he turns up a while later with a big truck and a lot of tattoos and a full compliment of lowblood quadrants. But those guys he snagged all broke up with highblood partners, coincidentally, so I guess he hasn't spent all his time sitting on his truck polishing his guns. But he had to meet them somehow, and I'm betting lowbloods get most of the supply jobs... anyway I don't know what this would mean for how good he's going to be at fighting, this season, you'd know. And the rustie in his heart quadrant has it in for Delia, who probably, like, killed one of her quadrantmates, and I'd bet you anything his other bulge buddies have grudges to settle, too, and the highbloods Corbin's wooed them away from have their grudges to settle with him and like half of them don't have anything to do with reenactment stuff, I think at least two do competitive landscaping because I mostly read about this on zomblogs. So maybe Corbin is going to drive a truck full of revenants into the middle of the battlefield and let them have at it, I don't fucking know. "Also, for what it's worth, he can do some really fierce winged eyeliner." She finishes diagramming the shipping grid and hands the pencils back to Bel, then steals his coffee.
You let her have it, busy annotating the grid with what you know of the participants' military connections and specialties, and shortly you sit back with a low whistle. "I should pay more attention to this stuff. I heard about his attempted cobalt collection after the fact, but he apparently made an effort to keep me out of it, probably because I'm not an idiot. His new friends are mean, though, I've run into a few of them before. I'll have to look into this a little deeper." You point at her with your pencil. "You, madam, may have saved my team a lot of grief, and possibly a few limbs. You want a muffin?" The troll behind the counter is just now sliding them into the pastry case, and they smell pretty fantastic.
"I'm going to get so fat!" Lainey says, extremely pleased. "Bring me the finest of muffins, sir. And then tell me about your team!"
After fetching the muffins, you bring up a group photo and show it to her. There are about thirty trolls in the picture, but the ones you want to show her are down on one knee in the front row, closest to the camera. "Here's me, obviously, and here's Pancho, my sergeant. Well, her rank's not always sergeant, and mine's not always captain, because it depends on the size of the battle and so forth, but that's how we structure our team anyway. The back two rows, I can tell you their names and strifekind and a few facts about them if you want, but they tend to come and go, I'm not sure how many of them will be with me this season. I'm bound to have to recruit at least a little. These guys in the front, though, these are my specialists. They're almost always in. Every one of them is batshit insane, also." You point them each out and give her the nutshell bio. Zulong Murfey, cobalt, fistkind, a little shorter and broader than you, with his bright red prosthetic arm bared by the torn-off sleeves of his uniform: demolitions. He's a little hard to manage, and will get unruly if you don't let him set something on fire at least once per battle, but he's smart and levelheaded and completely without fear. He joined up right after his moirail got killed in a territorial dispute about a sweep and a half ago. You're pretty sure he's no longer trying to get himself killed. Has been forbidden to bring his dragon lusus to the wars because wow, unfair. Onamie Tengou, teal, swordkind, pretty as a picture and fancy as a flower garden: air support. Probably the reason Zulong's deathwish is in remission, though it's too early to say what quadrant they're heading for. Her crow lusus is regular sized, and thus makes an excellent spy, but what she really loves to do is fly. Gliders, balloons, parachutes, paragliders, whatever the battle's tech level will allow. On Ascension, she pretty much has The Aviatrix sewn up. Fionne Taulin, olive, 2x swordkind, far too gentle for the wars despite being disturbingly lethal: lusus wrangler. He's a little dim and not quite all there; he lost his own lusus a long time ago, and has compensated by adopting any animal that will hold still to be petted. He can outright control the dumb ones, and confuse the smart ones enough that they mostly fail to attack. He can also make a hell of a mess with those swords. And some of his pets are pretty murderous. Ankala Pardus, olive, clawkind, wearing camo facepaint and a bodysuit so she's hard to see even in the photo: scout. She's so stealthy you've had to institute a 'check in verbally when I call roll, simply standing in front of me is insufficient' policy. She's also nicknamed 'grumpy kitty' for a good reason. For a while you thought she and Zulong were going to go pale, because he took her in hand when she was going through a rough patch, but it didn't go there for whatever reason. They're pretty good friends, though, and he can usually find her even when no one else can. Cavino Abydos, amber, officially dartkind but proficient with even more specibi than you, dapper in his perfectly pressed uniform, hair in a fall of tiny braids with gold beads on the ends: communications. His scarab lusus is perched on his shoulder like an epaulet, looking tiny and opalescent and deceptively fragile; you've seen it get stepped on by a hoofbeast and come away with nothing worse than a cracked wing case, which it had molted off by the next meet. You have no idea where Cavino got his education in spycraft, but he makes you look like a dabbler; you'd beg him for lessons if you trusted him an inch. Throgg Khorne, maroon, 2x gunkind, so big in his power armor with his paired chain guns that the grunts in the row behind him are on tiptoes or leaning sideways to be seen: mobile artillery, siegebreaker, battering ram, main battle tank with shoes. He's dumb as paint and loves to kill, which are not traits you look for in a recruit, but Zulong vouched for him, and he's more useful than you expected. Disturbing, but useful. "They all have one thing in common," you finish. "They get the job done. It's a surprisingly rare trait." ((haha i feel kind of silly for writing that but it was fun))
Lainey settles back in her chair, nibbling her muffin thoughtfully. "Well, none of them are high enough to support interest as a solo focus feature, butif there's a juicy enough quadrant conflict set to play out this season they might make for a decent enough contextualization that I can keep pulling hits in from my regular ship-spotting audience. Still, if people wanted to follow rust romances they'd just have a look at LieJournal. Fuck." She wrinkles her nose. "The gossip hits are going to drop fucking dead, though, Blue, you're only barely making the cut because you're in the videos with Lord Aspera and you dress well. We're just going to have to hope the wargame nerds catch enough interest in our coverage to make up for it... You think you can campaign against anyone real popular, maybe get some blackroms or star-crossed pale feels sparked?"
You laugh at the thought of trying to set Zulong up with anyone, let alone a violet. "I choose my allies by competence and reliability, and as you noted, I'm only cobalt. I fight on the side my higher-caste allies pick. That said, some of them might have some drama brewing, and I do know Belwas to talk to, even if we've only discussed military matters before. I could probably find out more about her situation." Then an idea occurs to you that starts a wicked grin spreading from the corner of your mouth. "I wonder if I could get Erskin to join up."
"If you can get him on the frontlines I'm a load gaper's lusus," Lainey snorts. "What would you even do with him? Besides look extremely hot in tight little uniforms, which I am sure would be great for morale."
"Here's hoping the enemy underestimates him as badly as you just did," you smirk, and then you tell her the story of the flaming paintballs.
By the end of the story she's laughing, and she finally sits back to brush crumbs off her shirt. "Okay, okay, so your rich and beautiful boyfriend's also great in a strife, I get it," she teases, grinning. "But where are you going to put him? Like, blackrom brings out the best in a troll, sure, but outside of sweatily romping around with you he's not like, much of a self-starter?"
"Depends on the battle," you shrug. "It hasn't been announced yet. I'm picking up rumors that it'll be low-tech, but that doesn't narrow it down much even if they're accurate. I'll probably use him a lot like I use Zulong -- give him an objective and just be like 'Okay, go do your thing.' In Zulong's case it's things like 'I would like that fortification to not be there.' In Erskin's case, I'm thinking geurilla hit-and-run against materiel rather than personnel. Unleashing him on the enemy's supply chain could be really, really fun."
Lainey hums. "Well, you'd know best! So— how does it generally go, when kismeses are on the same side of a campaign together? He's going to be nominally under your command, even, isn't he, so like, do you think that's going to make things awkward?"
"Oh, absolutely," you say lightly. "He'll probably pick the worst possible times to dig in his heels or go off the rails. He doesn't think ahead, he's the kind of troll who throws something up in the air and forgets about it before it comes down, so it's a pure misfortune and not his fault at all when it lands on his head." You sigh happily. "I hate him so much."
