Dominique the Resourceful
Dominique the Resourceful
By Geoff Bottone
The Red Dragon Inn 10 launches goes live on Kickstarter October 10th!
ZERINNE ISLAND
NEWLY REUNIFIED NATION OF GARNIER
FARNSDAY 12, 834
0930 HOURS
As Dominique flapped her towel open and laid it on the sand, she cast a surreptitious gaze about her. Despite the perfect blue sky and gently rolling surf, the remote beach was otherwise deserted. This didn’t rule out the possibility that unknown parties were observing her from the thick, leafy greenery that formed the boundary between beach and jungle, of course.
She knelt down on her towel and opened the cover on her small picnic basket. Inside were some breaded fish rolls, a jar of dried apricots, a gourd of fresh water, and something that looked not unlike a crab made out of magic and gears. As Dominique reached in for the gourd–conveniently blocking the basket from any potential jungle onlookers, the mechanical crab scuttled over the side and burrowed into the sand.
She took a sip of water, opened her beach umbrella, and spent the next few minutes watching the surf and wiggling her webbed toes in the sand. She had just about lost herself in the role of overworked artificer trying to relax at the beach when the mechanical crab burrowed up between her feet, its beady little eyes flashing bright green.
All clear.
As the crab clambered back into the picnic basket, Dominique got up and waded into the surf. Despite knowing that there was no one watching her, she spent some time splashing around before diving beneath the waves.
Despite being here for work, Dominique savored her first plunge, doing graceful loop-de-loops and feeling the exhilaration of the water streaming past her gills. She was disciplined enough to do this for only about a minute before she changed course and swam outward and downward, to the bulk of darker rocks that littered the bottom of the lagoon.
Brightly colored fish flashed away from her as she swam toward the rocks, and to the massive, bubbling clam nested amongst them. After checking her surroundings one last time, she extended a knuckle and tapped out a pattern on the clam’s shell.
The clam shuddered and opened in response, revealing a fist-sized pearl resting on the pale flesh within. Dominique took the pearl and, with a sharp twist of her hands, unscrewed it. She held up one side of the pearl to her ear as the message contained within began to play.
“Good morning, Agent D.
“While the recent treaty signing has officially ended the war, many soldiers have yet to return home. We have recently learned that five are being unlawfully detained in a labor camp in Triesame. The Triesame leadership insists they do not have our soldiers and denies the existence of the camp, and so we must look to other methods to secure their release.
“Your mission, which you have already accepted by listening to this message, is to infiltrate the prison camp and free our soldiers. As always–”
“You never heard of me and you’re not going to help me, blah, blah, blah,” said Dominique, as she gently felt around the inside of the giant clam shell. Beneath a flap of pink muscle, she found a tight tube of waterlogged maps and other documents to help her with her mission. She hoped that command had used the best quality waterproof ink.
“–message will self-destruct,” the half-pearl warned her. “Good luck, Dominique.”
Dominique lobbed the pearl as far away from her as the water pressure allowed, watching in mild fascination as cracks appeared across the pearl’s surface to vent bubbles and smoke. Then she turned and kicked her way back toward the beach.
The game, as a great drence had once said, was afin!
GAVOCH PENINSULA
FORMER REBEL STATE OF TRIESAME
SHALNSDAY 15, 834
2122 HOURS
Dominique, her exposed skin covered with camouflaging dye, knelt amidst the jungle fronds and waited for her crabs to come back. She tried to resist the urge to swat at the mosquitos that were turning her into a buffet and playing loud, whining symphonies in her ears. She doubted that the guards in the camp down the hill would hear her, but it paid to be cautious.
She was very glad when her small team of surveillance crabs did come scuttling back to her, because she was on the verge of flailing around at the cloud of mosquitoes like a frantic cat. The five crabs fanned out, creating a rough pentagonal outline on the ground. Their eyes flashed green as a spectral image appeared in the gap between them.
A top-down view of the labor camp formed before her, sketched out in bright green lines. It was defended by a palisade wall that had only two gates–one that opened onto a dirt road and the other that opened out onto a stone dock that thrust out into a narrow inlet. Tiny red dots–too many for Dominique’s liking–were posted in various places inside the palisade. Most were stationed near the gates and atop the watch towers, but others stood vigil in among low, rectangular buildings.
She’d been in places that were more heavily guarded than this. But not many.
Dominique compared the image in the projection to the crumpled map of the area Command had provided. It took a few minutes, but she was able to calculate an approach that would both keep her concealed from anyone on the guard towers and allow her to reach the labor camp’s least well-defended side.
She opened one of her belt pouches. The arcanopicture vanished as the crabs all turned in unison to scurry up over her lap and into the pouch. Once Dominique had strapped them in, she rose to a crouch and crept through the underbrush toward the labor camp. The mosquitoes, desperate to hang onto an easy food source, swarmed around Dominique as she traveled.
It wasn’t long before the palisade wall loomed above her, a barrier of rough-cut logs held in place by sturdy iron pins. To dissuade intruders, the clever soldiers of the Triesame traitor brigade had set the logs at an outward-facing angle, making it difficult for any hypothetical spies to climb inside.
Dominique looked up at the wall and, despite the peril of her mission and her bevy of blistering bites, cracked a smile. Sure, yes, Triesame might have been smart enough to foil the plans of regular spies, but they hadn’t foreseen a spy who had decided to dual-class into artificing.
She opened one of her other belt pouches and took out a handful of rough, conical shells. These were her custom-made artificial barnacles, able to adhere to almost any surface and nearly impossible to remove. All she needed to do was place one against the palisade like so, give the top a press, wait for a count of five, and then…
The yellowish fluid that had oozed out around the edge of the artibarny–she still wasn’t sold on the name, but it was the best one she had come up with so far–turned clear as it dried. Dominique gave an experimental tug and nodded in satisfaction. The barnacle wasn’t going anywhere. She placed a second barnacle above the first, standing on tippy toes to get it as high up on the palisade as possible.
When that one was secure, Dominique donned a pair of leather gloves whose palms were fitted with brass cups designed to fit perfectly over the barnacles. Using the lowest barnacle as a foothold, she scrambled up the wall and locked the cup on her right glove over the uppermost barnacle. Hanging from that position, she placed a third artibarny above her head, waited the appropriate amount of time for it to cure, and continued climbing.
It still wasn’t easy. As she strained and sweated and silently cursed, Dominique was already thinking of several critical improvements that would make this method of infiltration a lot faster and easier. Something with a mechanical winch, for starters.
With a last burst of effort from her quaking muscles, she pulled herself up on top of the palisade. No matter how badly she wanted to rest and catch her breath, Dominique knew that was a very bad idea. She had approached the palisade from the back, as far away from the two gates and equidistant from the two nearest watchtowers. While this made her fractionally less likely to be seen it did not, unfortunately, make her invisible. She needed to get down and out of view quickly, before one of the guards happened to look her way.
Fortunately, both gravity and the palisade slope would now be working in her favor, and it didn’t take long for Dominique to set another couple of artibarny and begin her descent. And, as a bonus, she had already thought of a way to make a chameleon suit out of cuttlefish skin by the time her feet touched the ground.
2132 HOURS
Dominique crawled along the edge of the palisade, keeping to the shadows to avoid the guards up in the towers. Unfortunately, she had been so focused on the towers that she had all but forgotten about the guards patrolling the inside of the labor camp. Had the approaching guard not happened to cough–and had there not been a wooden packing case nearby for her to hide under–she would already have been neutralized.
Fortunately the fates were with her, and she was able to resume her journey to the detention building. As she crept closer, Dominique heard splashing off to her left. Curious about the sound, and wanting to make sure it didn’t herald even more guards, she decided to investigate.
The splashing came from a deep, artificial pool. Luminous seaweed grew up from the bottom, providing light, food, and shelter to the military hippocampi swimming around within it. From her vantage point, Dominique saw the opening of a large, underground pipe that opened into the side of the pool. She assumed that this pipe linked the pool to the narrow harbor on the far side of the palisade wall, allowing the Triesame lancers to mount up and leave the base at a moment’s notice.
Dominique had no plans to leave the labor camp just yet, but she could still use the hippocampi to her advantage. She took a large, polished conch shell from one of her pouches and fitted it with one of several brass mouthpieces she carried in leather loops on her belt. As she fitted the mouthpiece into the hole at the bottom of the conch, Dominique retreated across the compound, trying to put as much distance between her and the pool as possible.
When she was well out of sight of the hippocampi, Dominique raised the conch to her lips and blew. Though her cheeks strained and her lungs burned from the effort, the conch emitted no audible sound.
That didn’t stop the hippocampi from kicking up a frenzy in the pool, though. The sound emitted by the conch was not only easily registered by the hippocampi’ sensitive ears, but it also almost exactly mimicked the hunting call of the great eastern dire shark. Dominique had learned, through extensive trial and error, that this was the sound that the average hippocampus disliked the most.
The quiet camp erupted into noise as the hippocampi churned their water into foam and let forth trumpeting, braying cries into the night. The guards in the tower cursed, picked up their weapons, and played powerful lights across the interior of the camp. Dominique retreated under the bulk of an overturned battle canoe as the lights zipped this way and that before finally converging on the pool. The guards on patrol inside the camp ran toward the light and the noise, shouting confused commands.
“…spooked the campi,” she heard one shout.
“…don’t see anything,” called down one of the tower guards.
“…how sensitive they can be,” ventured a third.
“…don’t tell me they’re in bloody heat already,” roared a particularly irritated soldier from somewhere fairly close by.
Dominique was sure that the guards weren’t going to become any more distracted, so she took this as her cue to make like an eel and swim–or more accurately, run–away from the kerfuffle to the back wall of the detention building. Once there, she shrugged off her backpack and extracted a large silver clamshell and three long pieces of tapered bone. With the speed and precision earned from long practice, she slotted the bones together. Then she placed it, wide end first, into the chuck on the side of the shell.
A moment later, the narwhal bit was screwed tight into the chuck, and Dominique had pressed its diamond-reinforced point into the wall. She pressed a stud on the bottom of the clamshell and the drill whirred to life. Sawdust and the smell of hot wood filled the air as Dominique pushed the drill into the wall.
She had done her very best to make the drill’s motor as quiet as possible, but even with all her precautions, Dominique was still afraid that the guards could hear her over the still thrashing hippocampi. It took all of her willpower to trust her artificing skill and let the drill do its work. Thankfully, it took only about thirty seconds for it to punch completely through the wall.
As she withdrew the drill, Dominique heard a startled voice come through the hole.
“Hello?”
“Identify yourself,” she whispered back.
“I’m Private Requin, of the 101st Crimson Fish, Loyalist Army of Garnier, 10984.”
“I’ve been sent by Garnier to extract you,” Dominique replied. “Are the other soldiers in your squadron there with you?”
“Yes, we’re all here. We can be ready in five.”
Dominique had already disassembled and stowed her drill. Now she took a tightly-wrapped tube of paper out of her pack.
“Going to have to be sooner than that. I’m going to blow the wall, and we’re going to need to move out immediately.”
“Roger that. Taking cov–”
Dominique couldn’t hear the soldier anymore, because she had already stuffed the tube in the borehole. She swung her pack onto her back, produced her small brass igniter from its pouch, and directed a streamer of fat, blue sparks at the tube. She confirmed that the paper had started to blacken before she turned and scampered along the wall and around the corner.
No sooner had she clapped her hands to her ears than the wall exploded, setting off a shockwave that rattled the detention building down to its foundations. Hoping that the soldiers had followed orders, she whipped back around the corner and toward the billowing plume of smoke and sawdust.
A sizable chunk of the back wall had been efficiently converted into toothpicks. Through the breach the explosion left behind, Dominique saw scattered furniture, toppled footlockers, and five soldiers sheltering in place behind a table. All of them had their hands clapped over their ears. All but one had their boots on.
“C’mon,” she hissed, even though she knew the soldiers probably couldn’t hear her right now. “Move out!”
She gesticulated wildly to punctuate her order. The soldiers broke from cover and ran for the breach. The last one made a valiant effort to leave the detention building and put her boots on at the same time.
It was good that they hurried, because the explosion had alerted everyone else in the camp. Beams of light flashed frantically around the camp while guards screamed confused orders to one another. Dominique knew she only had a few seconds before someone thought to check the building where they kept all the prisoners.
She opened her crab pouch and let out a low whistle. Her artificed crabs clack-clacked their brass claws as they whirred to life and scuttled down her leg.
“Distraction protocol delta,” she said, a touch of emotion creeping into her voice. Whatever happened next, it was not likely that her little crab friends would survive the night. Yes, they were still machines. Yes, she could always make more. But still.
The crabs fell into formation and darted sideways around one side of the building. Dominique caught the attention of the momentarily baffled soldiers and pointed in the opposite direction.
“Let’s move, people. Double time!”
2132 HOURS
The crabs earned their keep by darting across the yard, projecting Dominique’s pre-recorded voice and drawing all kinds of attention.
“Triesame’s got nothin’ on me!”
“Over here!”
“Garnier’s where I want to be!”
“No! Over here!”
“Sound off! One-two!”
“You’re both wrong! She’s back here!”
“The only thing that’s back here is a crab, you idiot!”
Dominique and the soldiers reached the palisade wall near her original intrusion point. Panting slightly, she took a second tightly wrapped tube of paper and, using one of her last artibarnies, adhered it to the palisade.
“It’s the crabs!” shouted a guard. “The crabs are talking. Stop looking at me like that and fan out. Go where the noise isn’t coming from!”
“Oh, fishsticks,” grumbled Dominique, as she pulled out her igniter. “Take cover! We’re going to be out of here in a second.”
As she aimed the igniter, a guard rounded the corner, pufferfish gun at the ready. He fired off a wild burst and shouted, “surrender!” as an afterthought.
Dominique grunted as one of the pufferfish spines sank into her elbow. Its venom took effect almost immediately, setting fire to her nerves and rendering her arm limp and lifeless. The igniter slipped from her tingling fingers, dropping out of sight into the tall grass.
“She’s here!” cried the guard. “I have he–”
It was at that moment that two of the soldiers rushed their attacker, laying him out with a rather brutal and thorough display of fisticuffs. One of them grabbed the pufferfish gun.
“C’mon,” said one of the other soldiers, “blow the thing and get us out of here.”
“I can’t,” said Dominique, trying to massage life back into her arm. “My igniter. I dropped it. I don’t see it anywhere.”
“Help her look!” shouted one of the soldiers.
Dominique heard the rapidly approaching shouts and footfalls of the camp guards, which were accompanied by the ominous clack-clack sounds of angry assault lobsters. She kicked at the grass helplessly, but failed to dislodge her lighter.
“No time,” she said, running along the palisade away from the approaching guards. “This way!”
She had gotten only a few steps when a second detachment of guards appeared in front of her. Several of them took aim with their pufferfish guns, while the lobster guards released their leashes and barked commands at their charges.
“Stay where you are!”
As the dog-sized lobsters raced toward her, clicking and hissing, Dominique fumbled around in a pouch with her left hand. With sweating fingers, she extracted a small, black sphere, which she handed to the nearest soldier.
“Give that a good throw. Right in the middle of them!”
“Roger that!”
The black sphere soared in a perfect arc, landing in the open space between the stationary guards and the lobsters. It detonated a half second later, spraying the area with a thick, oily mist. The soldiers looked on in awe as the guards and lobsters collapsed, thrashing.
“Augh! I can’t see!”
“My eyes!”
Hiss! Did-a-chunk!
“What the hell was that?” whispered an awestruck soldier.
“Aerosolized squid ink,” said Dominique, with more than a little note of self-satisfaction.
“It buuurns.”
“With some jellyfish toxin. For extra spice.”
“You got any more of those?” said one of the other soldiers, “because that group behind us is getting close!”
“No.” Dominique looked around, saw an alley between two of the camp’s buildings that were currently unobstructed. “This way! C’mon!”
2138 HOURS
Dominique was so focused on fleeing the guards that she almost tripped and fell into the hippocampus pool.
“Okay,” she shouted, as she tried to will life and sensation back into her poisoned arm. “We can work with this. This is good. Get in the pool, everyone. We’re hippocampus thieves now.”
The soldiers leaped past her, plunging one after the other into the pool. The hippocampi, which had just managed to calm down from the effects of Dominique’s conch, immediately riled up again when unfamiliar drence cannonballed into their liquid stables.
Just as the last soldier was about to take the plunge, one of the others poked their head up from beneath the churning water.
“It’s no good. There’s a gate down inside the tube. We can’t get out.”
Dominique and the other soldier quickly scanned the area, but there was no sign of any release mechanism for the gate.
“Blobfish butts,” cursed Dominique. “They probably release it from inside one of the bunkers.”
The soldier still standing on dry land took a moment to finally stuff the boot she had been carrying onto her feet. “What now?” she shouted, as she pulled the laces taut. “Everybody out of the pool?”
The lights from the towers swept across the labor camp, rapidly converging on their location. Dominique could hear the shouts of the approaching guards and the furious click-clicks of the attack lobsters.
“No. Help me with my pack.”
The soldier yanked the pack off of Dominique’s back and set it on the ground. Dominique crouched, fumbling at the pack’s ties with her left hand.
“That long pocket on the side,” she pointed. “No, the other one. There’s three flat pieces in there with teeth on the sides.”
“The ones that look like a sawshark’s rostrum?”
“Yeah, exactly.” Dominique grabbed the silver clamshell out of the pack and stood on it, using her left hand to spin the chuck open. “You’re going to fit those together. They only go together one way. No, not that way.”
“Sorry,” said the soldier as she snapped the last piece of the sawblade in place.
Behind them, another soldier popped their head up out of the pool. “We’ve got the hippocampi calmed, but the gate’s still closed. What are we doing?”
“Just hang on a second,” Dominique growled. “If you’ve still got that pufferfish gun, now would be a fantastic time to lay down some covering fire.”
“Got it!”
To her assistant, Dominique said, “all right, the round thing on the bottom of the saw goes in here. Yeah, just jam it in there. A couple of turns of this and–yeah! Good and tight. Now, you’re going to take this down there and use it to saw through the gate. This button here turns it on. Keep your hands away from the blade.”
Her assistant picked up the power saw as all of the tower lights found them. Dominique squinted in the false dawn as her assistant dove below. At the same time, one of the other soldiers popped out of the pool, pufferfish gun in hand.
“There! There!” shouted one of the tower guards, as toxic fish spines ripped into the ground all around Dominique.
Attack lobsters dragging their leashes scrambled from between two buildings, the tower lights gleaming on their polished claws. The soldier beside Dominique took aim and fired off a volley, only to let out a cry of disgust when the spines ricocheted harmlessly off of the lobster’s hardened exoskeletons.
Meanwhile, Dominique had spent a critical few moments undoing her belt and dropping it on the ground in front of her. This allowed her to access the pouch holding the conch and one of her other brass mouthpieces.
As she slotted the mouthpiece into the conch, the soldier beside her let out a pained cry and tumbled backward, a pufferfish spine protruding from his arm and lower lip.
“Ahmb sowwy,” he slurred. “Dey gabtd me.”
“It’s okay, soldier, you’ve done enough. Get below!”
The soldier rolled over the edge of the pool as Dominique picked up the conch in her left hand and held it to her lips. Unlike when it was fitted with the hippocampus mouthpiece, the note that it sounded was perfectly audible. She winced as a pufferfish spine glanced off of the body of the conch. A second spine took her in the right thigh, and put an abrupt end to her impromptu concert.
As she listed to one side and keeled over, the guards formed a ring around the hippocampus pool.
“Surrender now!” roared the guard in the lead. “This is your last–AAAIEEE!”
In their zeal to neutralize her, the guards hadn’t noticed the effect that Dominique’s conch had on their attack lobsters. Driven into a rage by what sounded like a lobster mating call, they had paired off to engage in dominance displays, rising up on their hind legs and snapping their claws menacingly in the air.
Unfortunately for the lead guard, a claw of one of the nearest lobsters just happened to snap closed on his leg.
“Sarge!” cried one of the guards
As several guards rushed forward to separate drence from lobster, Dominique grabbed her pack with her good arm and wriggled her way into the pool. In the dim light, she saw that her assistant had sawn through one of the bars blocking the exit, and was already mostly through with a second.
Thanks to her own natural buoyancy and the thoughtful assistance of the former POWs, Dominique was able to climb onto the back of the nearest hippocampus. She looped her left arm through the straps of her pack before wrapping her elbow around the hippocampus’s neck. It bucked a little, and squirted bubbles, but it otherwise seemed to accept her presence.
Ahead of her, Dominique saw the second bar, shorn from its moorings, fall slowly to the bottom of the pool. With it gone, there was an opening in the grate just wide enough for the hippocampi to fit through. Seeing that her work was done, the assistant threw the power saw to one side in a gesture that, if Dominique was feeling less pressured and less injured, would have made her very upset. Then the assistant swam onto the back of the last hippocampus and sharply kicked it in the flanks.
The pool exploded as armed labor camp guards dove into their midst, their pufferfish guns spraying darts and bubbles in all directions. But they were too late, for the mounted and very distressed hippocampi were already swimming single file through the damaged grate and down the access tube to the harbor. Dominique kept her head down, just in case her frantic mount accidentally swam too close to the ceiling. She felt a moment of claustrophobic terror, but then the tube opened out into the waters of the harbor and she was safely away.
The hippocampi breached the water, moving at speed away from the labor camp and out into the open sea. Dominique dared a look back, both to make sure she had left with the appropriate number of POWs and to check on the status of the guards back at the camp. The lights in the towers were already swiveling around to follow her progress, and she could hear some of the guards screaming about opening the palisade gates and getting the boats ready to pursue.
Dominique allowed herself a small chuckle, because by the time the pursuit boats sails were unfurling, she and the rescued soldiers were already almost out of sight.
YSTEE ARCHIPELAGO
NEWLY REUNIFIED NATION OF GARNIER
KORSDAY 22, 834
1901 HOURS
Dominique, fully recovered from her mission and dressed in her traditional artificer attire, walked up to the side door of the small adobe building and knocked. A moment later, an elderly drence man opened the door and flashed her a mostly toothless smile.
“I hear you have a wonky flux inhibitor,” said Dominique.
“I do,” replied the old man, his unfocused eyes suddenly becoming clear and bright. “I wish my son had told me about it before sunset.”
“It doesn’t matter when the sun sets,” Dominique replied with the memorized countersign. “Because I work nights.”
The old man nodded benignly and handed her a small wooden box before bidding her goodnight and closing the door.
Dominique left the building and headed for the moonlit beach. She was pleased to find it mostly deserted as she walked along it, the box tucked under her arm. She passed by numerous narrow beach cabanas, their bright colors dulled by sun and salt. When she got to the seventeenth one, she opened the door and stuffed herself inside.
What she expected to find in the box was one of the new magitech batteries that the government artificers had recently developed. They were an incredibly efficient power source unavailable to the general public. Dominique had asked her wages to be paid with batteries, instead of the usual elemental metals, for her occasional freelance spywork.
Instead, the box contained a large scallop, which rested atop several documents.
“You did a great job,” said Dominique, as she set the box down on the cabana’s narrow sheet and tapped the top of the scallop. “Your reward is more work.”
Dominique tugged out the documents from beneath the slowly opening scallop and began to peruse them. There was a map of the continent on the edge of the western sea, the manifest of a ship, and a watercolor portrait of a very large, very busy looking inn and tavern. An ornate sign on the front read, “The Red Dragon Inn.”
As the scallop opened, a tinny voice began to speak.
“Good morning, Agent D.
“With the conclusion of the civil war, the government has been able to direct its efforts to its other large scale projects. One of these is establishing easier and safer travel between the archipelago and the continent of Orrean to the far west. We know little about this land, and do not know if they would be hostile or kindly disposed to us.
“Your mission, which you have already accepted…”